Hard heads, soft landings

                                            Photo: Getty Images

Is the US economy headed for a soft landing – that is, for an easing of inflation (the average rate of increase in prices) without more unemployment?

Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers doubts it. "The idea that bringing down inflation has nothing to do with increasing unemployment runs different from all conventional macroeconomic assessments.”

Well, let’s see. In the usual model, there is indeed a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, given the inflation that people expect. If inflation is higher than expected, then workers will demand pay hikes to cover the higher cost of living. Employers will resist with layoffs.

But if expectations of inflation fall, the whole relationship between inflation and unemployment changes. Every rate of unemployment can occur with lower inflation than before.  This is because workers no longer expect such steep increases in the cost of living, so they don’t demand such high pay hikes. Employers are willing to accommodate their moderate demands.

The upshot is that in principle, the labor market can continue to clear but at lower inflation, with no change in unemployment. In theory, a soft landing is perfectly possible.  The Fed "just" needs to lower expectations of inflation.

But today those expectations are stubbornly high. The Survey of Consumer Expectations at the New York Fed indicates that people have been anticipating about 4% inflation for a year, double their expectations in 2020.  True, expectations have fallen for three months, but only slightly.

Another bit of discouraging news is that, unusually, long-term interest rates have fallen below short-term rates.  This usually signals a recession. The idea is that investors expect a recession to cut spending and thus cut the demand to hold money.  This would lower the price of borrowing money, which is the interest rate. This may occur because investors expect the Fed to try to cut expectations of inflation by raising interest rates now (as indeed it is doing) and lowering them later when unemployment rises. This would explain the pattern that we observe today: High interest rates today, expectations that low rates would occur years later.

But the matter is not so clear. Expectations of higher unemployment haven't changed much for a year. Only about 40% of survey respondents expect unemployment to rise, and the share is dropping slightly, according to the New York Fed. This doesn’t suggest that the typical person expects a recession.

As always with the national economy, any prognostication is a judgment call.  I wouldn't rule out a spike in unemployment in 2024. But neither would I expect it, as long as the Fed continues to signal that it won't let inflation rise. The Fed’s sudden if belated boosts in interest rates have been accompanied by a halving of inflation in a year. I think it’s succeeding.

The key is that the wage, adjusted for inflation, is rising while job gains are falling. The labor market is heating up, and the resulting clamor for pay hikes causes employers to think twice about creating jobs. But this need not cause unemployment to skyrocket. It's a natural adjustment of the labor market to a rise in labor demand.

The informal forecast of an unemployment spike usually draws upon our awful experience in the Seventies and early Eighties, when annual inflation hit 13.5%. The Fed had not been in the habit of controlling the money supply, and expectations of inflation spiraled out of control. To cope, the new Fed governor, Paul Volcker, jacked up interest rates to record levels, engineering a deep recession. This convinced people that the Fed meant business, and expectations of inflation fell. 

Today, thanks partly to Volcker, neither inflation nor expectations of it are nearly as high as before. It need not be the case that cutting inflation to 2% now will require a major recession.  People have already seen what the Fed is capable of doing.  

I suspect that as long as the Fed is careful, we can have a soft landing.  But I’ve been wrong before.  After all, I’m a journalist. -- Leon Taylor, Baltimore tayloralmaty@gmail.com

 

References

Jeff Stein. Larry Summers was Biden’s biggest inflation critic. Was he wrong? - The Washington Post

Survey of Consumer Expectations - FEDERAL RESERVE BANK of NEW YORK (newyorkfed.org)