Posted on 06/07/2022 11:29:27 AM PDT by entropy12
In a little-known part of the financial market that’s had the most accurate reads on U.S. inflation so far, traders are pricing in an annual headline rate on the consumer-price index of 8.5% or higher for the next five months, starting with May.
As of Tuesday, fixings, or derivatives-like instruments related to the market for Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS, imply that May’s year-over-year consumer-price index reading on Friday will come in at 8.5%. That’s above the 8.2% median forecast of economists polled by The Wall Street Journal and would match the 40-year high hit in March. Fixings traders also see the rate climbing to 8.6% in June and July, before hitting 8.8% in August and September. October’s reading is seen at 8%.
Investors have been oscillating between competing narratives in which inflation either starts to actually break lower or breaks lower but turns into a false hope. Not many appear to be set up for the possibility that headline CPI readings simply keep running hot, even as the Federal Reserve aggressively hikes interest rates. U.S. stocks swung between gains and losses on Tuesday as investors await Friday’s CPI print for May.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
In other words, if inflation is still way too high and needs to come down, then the only other arrow in the Fed's quiver is to raise interest rates bigly. Or they could change their mind and reduce their balance sheet a lot more.
Either way it lets a lot of air out of the way overinflated market and a lot of new investors are going to have a trial by fire.
These numbers are misleading.
The actual rates are much higher than the headline numbers.
With elections coming up in November, the Fed won’t be able to keep tightening without appearing to ‘interfere’ in the elections. They will have to pause right after summer IMO, thereby not doing what they need to do to get the fires of inflation under control. This of course will only prolong the problem.
Those numbers are adjugated for CPI and are valid for CPI. So yes, we can argue that CPI does not reflect inflation felt by some people. We are all in different income brackets, different spending habits, different in percentage of debt carried compared to annual income, etc. So inflation will affect different people differently. In my own case, so far inflation has had minimal impact on my immediate family of 2 retired people. But we are not the average American family.
FED has no chair with a pair! LOL that rhymes pretty good haha. You are right, the FED will act cowardly and prolong the fires of inflation. We don’t have Volcker any more.
I think most people know that the rate of inflation is understated by quite a bit. They see prices rising in everything they purchase. What’s really hurting is the surge in prices of necessities.
It is true that some people will feel the effects of inflation more than others. No disagreement there.
With respect to your particular situation, retirees tend not to spend as much as younger people do. And many no longer have mortgages to pay. That said, a lot of retirees depend on fixed incomes to live on. Even those fortunate enough to have pensions probably don’t get annual adjustments sufficient enough to keep pace with inflation like we are/will be experiencing. In the absence of rising income retirees will begin to feel the pinch and have to make lifestyle adjustments.
Inflation is always with us but a couple years of high, compounded inflation can significantly reduce your spending power. The solution is to have assets that can grow and produce rising income to try to keep even with the effects of inflation and taxes.
Understand everything you said. In our own case, house is mortgage free and less than 3 years old, both cars have no loans, and we have no credit card loans. And luckily we live close to everything we need to drive to. We need less than 2 gallons of gas every week.
I have pretty much already bought all the tools from Lowe’s and Home Depot, but when I go there to buy weed killer and lawn fertilizer, I notice prices of everything have been jacked up more than the CPI. So only serious inflation we are feeling right now is at the grocery stores and restaurants. But if one of the cars breaks down, it will be punch in the gut to find out what the repair will cost.
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