The battle is intensifying between the Fed Governors’ inflation doves and hawks as we approach November. Chairman Powell says inflation is getting closer to the Fed’s 2 percent target when we enter the 3rd quarter 2024, but he’s still not confident enough to advocate cutting interest rates.
This is while the Labor Department’s JOLTS report showed the number of job openings in the U.S. rebounded in May after falling to a more than three-year low, showing the demand for labor is still high.
It will only make the Fed’s decisions more difficult, since there is a lot of disagreement over how much the US economy will continue to grow (which the Fed worries might keep the inflation numbers too high).
Job postings rose to 8.1 million in May from 7.9 million in April, the Labor Department said Tuesday in its Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). Most of the increased hiring was in government. New openings have fallen from a record 12 million in 2022, but they are still higher than they were before the pandemic.
An economic conference in Sintra, Portugal highlighted both sides of the inflation argument, with Chicago Fed President Goolsby saying Fed policy is now becoming too restrictive as the economy slows. It’s therefore time to consider cutting interest rates, though he didn’t want to “tie the Fed’s hand” by predicting when.
The best news was last week’s very weak Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) inflation index, which was flat. The Fed’s preferred inflation measure didn’t increase at all in June and annual inflation is now down to 2.6 percent.
And NYTimes Paul Krugman remarked in his latest Op-ed, “there’s a good case for arguing that inflation has been defeated, and that the Fed should start cutting interest rates.”
Friday will tell us another statistic the Fed looks at, the ‘official” US unemployment report, which will show how accurate are the job numbers.
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 272,000 in May, I wrote last month,, higher than the average monthly gain of 232,000 over the prior 12 months. The unemployment rate rose to 4.0 percent from 3.9 percent, slightly higher than the pre-pandemic levels of 3.5 percent when the average inflation rate was under 2 percent, as portrayed in the truncated FRED graph (gray line is 2020 pandemic recession), that many seem to remember so fondly.
The real argument is over who benefits from lower interest rates. Lower borrowing costs obviously benefit consumers in general; most in the middle and lower income brackets. But the Fed’s fear is that consumers will then spend more and thus drive up prices again, hence their hesitation in cutting interest rates just yet.
That in turn affects economic growth, which everyone wants, but not too much, if you can believe that. It stimulates more hires, which boosts wages, which the Fed believes is now the main inflation culprit.
The best predictor of economic growth has been the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate that gets revised at least twice a month. It has just been adjusted downward again in July1 to 1.7 percent, from as high in 3 percent one month ago.
It is now in line with the Blue Chip economists’ consensus of 2nd quarter growth, which should begin to worry Powell’s Federal Reserve. Real personal consumption and domestic investment have been falling, in line with last week’s PCE report I mentioned above.
Retail sales last month were also flat, another concern as consumers look for more bargains and retailers such as Target and Walmart announce ever more discounts. The slowdown is now becoming a definite trend and better the Fed becomes proactive by nipping any downturn in the bud before the November election.
Harlan Green © 2024
Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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