Today’s Producer Price Index for Final Demand, a measure of the cost of wholesale prices, provides the first concrete evidence that we may be entering a period of deflation this New Year.
And, perhaps require the Fed to begin to lower interest rates as soon as in March. Though ongoing wars may cause future shortages but that isn’t happening at present.
Why? Raw material costs are declining into deflation territory, a sign of overproduction, which means prices that consumers must pay for the finished product or service will possibly decline into negative territory as well—when the excess profit margins of distributors and retail sellers that took advantage of the pandemic shortages also subsides.
Overproduction last happened in the 2007-09 Great Recession, as I’ve said, and began a period of Quantitative Easing requiring the Fed to buy massive amounts of securities to increase liquidity enough to boost the inflation rate back to the 2 percent range.
Wholesale prices this round first went into negative territory in July 2022 (-0.28%) per the FRED PPI graph, then fluctuated wildly for several months as supply chains recovered. But the PPI has been negative for the past 3 months, which is a sign that most supply chains have more than recovered.
The danger of overproduction has happened many times in the past and been a major cause of recessions. The Great Recession was caused by the overproduction of housing, for example; some one million excess units.
We saw signs of this in yesterday’s Consumer Price Index as well, when the so-called core index without food and energy prices declined to 3.9 percent for the first time since May 2021, mainly due to lower energy, healthcare, and used car prices.
Energy prices are declining because non-OPEC countries are now outproducing OPEC oil producing countries, for starters, and the food category was up just 2.7% year-over-year, with food away from home up 5.2% during the month and food at home up just 1.3%.
The FAO Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of commonly traded food commodities, was 13.7% lower last year than the 2022 average, but measures of sugar and rice prices growing in that time.
The pace of inflation for food at home has now been below the Federal Reserve's overall target rate of 2% for three straight months, although the overall level of food prices is still elevated compared to two and three years ago.
Another reason for the deflation concern is consumers usually cut back their spending in the spring. The holiday spending spree is over, and tax season is approaching, which makes personal savings a priority.
In fact, we are already in the Fed’s 2 percent target range. The Personal Consumption Expenditure Price (PCE) Index is already at 1.9% and Core CPI Prices at 2.0% over the past 6 months.
What Fed officials seldom admit is the 2 percent inflation target isn’t a reliable target because there is no accurate measure of inflation as economists such as former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have admitted.
Overproduction can become a serious problem as it was during the Great Recession, but the possibility of supply disruptions because of the ongoing Ukraine and Middle East conflicts have made financial analysts leery of even mentioning the possibility of deflation.
The possibility of deflation scared the Fed enough under former Chairman Ben Bernanke to cut the Fed Funds rate to zero percent for a prolonged period—from December 2008 to February 2016.
Can that happen again if the Fed doesn’t begin to lower interest rates sooner?
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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