Fed Finds Record-Low OECD Inflation as ECB Shows Convergence
By Rich Miller and Simon Kennedy
April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet can’t afford to let the economic recovery distract them from the danger of falling into a deflationary morass akin to Japan’s.
Core consumer prices, which strip out volatile food and energy costs, rose a record-low 1.5 percent in February from a year earlier in the 30 countries that form the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists see core inflation falling further later this year to about 0.3 percent in the U.S. and 0.2 percent in the euro area.
The disinflationary trend is driven by the slack built up during the global economic slump. The 1.9 percent growth in OECD economies that the Paris-based organization forecasts for 2010 still will leave their total output for the year 4.1 percent below potential. With that much excess capacity, companies will remain under pressure to cut prices to keep customers and reduce costs to bolster profit.
Policy makers have “gotten their eye off the immediate ball, which is deflation risk,” said Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed official who is now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s misguided for anybody to be talking about exiting” from stimulus during the next year.
Investors can profit from slowing inflation by selling Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, Michael Vaknin, global fixed-income strategist for Goldman Sachs in London, said in a March 29 note to clients. The gap between yields on Treasuries and so-called TIPS due in two years, a measure of the outlook for consumer prices, stood at 1.56 percent on April 5, down from 2.92 percent on June 16, 2008.
Yield Curve Flattening
Vaknin also sees the U.S. Treasury yield curve flattening as long-term rates fall in tandem with inflation. The difference between yields on two and 10-year Treasury notes was 281.6 basis points on April 5.
Falling core inflation “suggests an on-hold type of stance for longer than was presumed in the past,” Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., said in a March 25 interview with Tom Keene and Michael McKee on Bloomberg Radio. “And it does suggest, in terms of inflation currently, that bonds are a decent type of investment.”
Even so, bonds “have seen their best days,” Gross said, because, on an inflation-adjusted basis, interest rates are rising “rather dramatically” as the U.S. and other nations issue debt to cover large budget deficits and the Fed ends its mortgage buying and aid to the asset-backed securities market.
Bernanke Persuasion
Traders in the Chicago federal-funds futures market are betting there’s about a 52 percent chance Bernanke will persuade his colleagues to raise the benchmark interest rate to 0.5 percent or higher from near zero at the central bank’s Sept. 21 meeting.
Bruce Kasman, chief economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, and Ethan Harris, head of North America economics at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch Global Research in New York, disagree. They don’t see the Fed changing the rate banks charge each other for overnight loans for the rest of this year.
Trichet’s ECB Governing Council convenes April 8 as Mark Wall, Deutsche Bank AG’s chief euro-area economist, and Janet Henry, HSBC Holdings Plc’s chief European economist, scrap forecasts for the refinancing rate to be raised this year from a record-low 1 percent. Both now expect the first increase since July 2008 to come next March.
‘Stay on Hold’
Major central banks “are going to stay on hold longer than otherwise, keeping zero rates or near-zero rates at least to the middle of next year,” Nouriel Roubini, a New York University professor and chairman of Roubini Global Economics LLC in New York, said in an interview.
Two years from now, “with core inflation well below target, a number of central banks will be in the odd position of seeking to boost inflation,” Harris said.
As Japan has learned to its cost during the last decade, deflation can be debilitating for an economy and difficult to escape. Faced with falling prices for their products, companies are unlikely to expand operations or add workers. Consumers are prone to delay purchases, hoping for better deals in the future.
Central banks can’t easily respond, because falling prices push up interest rates in real, inflation-adjusted terms, further reducing the willingness of businesses and households to borrow and spend.
Dow Chemical
Dow Chemical Co., the largest U.S. chemical maker, reported Feb. 2 that the prices it received on products sold worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2009 were 6 percent less than a year ago. Prices fell 17 percent for the full year, the Midland, Michigan- based company said.
Paris-based Lafarge SA, the world’s-biggest cement producer, said Feb. 19 that it expects its prices will fall in Spain as it anticipates a drop in sales volume there of as much as 15 percent.
Core consumer prices in the U.S. climbed 1.3 percent in February from a year ago, the smallest increase in six years, Labor Department data show. In the three months through February, they rose at an annualized rate of 0.1 percent.
Prices on 45.2 percent of the products and services covered by the government’s personal-consumption-expenditure price index -- everything from desktop computers to parking fees -- fell in February, according to calculations by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
‘Very Benign’
“The inflation data’s been very benign,” said Carl Lantz, head of U.S. interest-rate strategy in New York at Credit Suisse Group AG. “There’s not much indication from the TIPS market that there’s a longer-term inflation risk.”
Some European countries are already flirting with deflation after property bubbles burst, complicating the ECB’s ability to set a uniform monetary policy across 16 nations. Consumer prices in Ireland fell 2.4 percent in February from a year earlier on an EU harmonized basis, the 12th consecutive decline. They dropped seven times in Spain and 10 in Portugal during the past 12 months for which data is available.
While that may allow those economies to pivot toward greater external demand by making their goods more competitive, the risk is lower prices will hurt more than help by forcing up real wages and the cost of servicing debt, said Eoin O’Callaghan, an economist at BNP Paribas SA in London. He predicts falling prices will spread, and the euro-area’s core rate will be declining by next March after slowing to a record 0.8 percent this February.
Greatest Risk
Spyros Andreopoulos, a Morgan Stanley economist in London, says inflation, not deflation, poses the greatest risk now. Emerging markets including China and India are rebounding, central banks created a record amount of monetary stimulus, government debt is mounting and the recession undermined the productive capacity of economies, leading to lower output gaps than many people realize, he said.
“We might see inflation sooner than commonly anticipated,” Andreopoulos said. Morgan Stanley predicts the Fed will raise its key rate in the third quarter, with the ECB following in December.
Among developed economies, Canada already may be facing the challenge of inflation after its core rate unexpectedly accelerated in February by 2.1 percent. Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, whose economists in January predicted the core measure wouldn’t reach 2 percent until the third quarter of next year, signaled March 24 he’s open to raising his benchmark interest rate as soon as June from 0.25 percent.
Inflation Expectations
The threat elsewhere is that as prices sag, inflation expectations follow, prompting consumers and companies to retrench. Such a shift may fuel a deflationary spiral similar to the one that has plagued Japan, where the economy last year shrank to 474.2 trillion yen ($5.02 trillion), without accounting for price changes, the lowest level since 1991.
Japanese prices excluding food and energy fell 1.1 percent in February after a 1.2 percent drop in both January and December, the biggest since the government began keeping records in 1971.
The Bank of Japan last month doubled a credit program for commercial lenders to 20 trillion yen, a move Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said is aimed at lowering borrowing costs further to spur growth and prices. Its policy board meets today and tomorrow.
While global inflation also slid after recessions in the 1970s and 1980s, JPMorgan’s Kasman says what’s different this time is the “prospect for record-low levels of developed-world core inflation during the first year of an economic expansion.”
“Japan’s experience provides a cautionary tale of the damage that can be wrought if deflation takes hold,” said Kasman, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “The current environment poses a unique challenge for central bankers.”
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