inflation

With Shinzo Abe’s radical economic policy shift now one year old, now is an appropriate time to look back and assess its effectiveness. I see results principally in asset prices and to a degree on inflation. However, it is not clear that…

The danger of Japan's current policy (Abenomics) is that the outcome could turn out to be the exact opposite of what was originally intended. With wages stagnant, these import-driven price increases are hitting the Japanese consumer quite…

Those inclined to the Fed tapering in December seem myopic. The employment was not the only economic report that was released before the weekend. The US also reported that the Fed's preferred measure of inflation, the deflator for core…

St. Louis Federal Reserve President, James Bullard, spoke to Bloomberg News Editor in Chief Matthew Winkler this morning at Bloomberg’s The Year Ahead 2014 conference in Chicago. What he said there confirmed my comments las week about the…

After having been considered to head both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Israel earlier this year, Lawrence Summers has been propelled back into the center of the broader economic dialogue with a speech at a recent IMF Economic Forum.…

According to an account in the Financial Times last week, the latest rate cut by the ECB created a worrying north-south split, with the German-centered group opposing rate cuts and the southern faction wanting them. Today Austrian and…

Weak inflation readings in the US continue provide the Fed with the rationale to maintain securities purchases in what amounts to a "QE trap". With the PCE inflation measure once again below one percent, the FOMC doves fear that "taper"…

Consumer price inflation in the Eurozone has been below the target of 2% and falling for quite some time. But until now, the ECB has been sitting on its hands. Inflation some distance below target didn't appear to bother it - most likely…

I've suggested previously that QE could actually be deflationary. I looked at it from several perspectives - collateral effects, the monetary transmission mechanism, distributive effects, even Peter Stella's "deadwood" inhibiting bank…

Over the past couple of years it has gradually become the consensus view that QE has failed because it hasn’t created the economic growth that everyone was hoping for. I find that view overly simplistic and naïve in equal measures. QE - or…