NICE decade is over

Mervyn King declared that the NICE decade was formally over in his Inflation Report published today – NICE stood for non-inflationary continuous expansion (a good term to use in the exam) – but the combination of sharply rising food, energy and fuel prices is driving inflation higher whilst contributing to a fall in real incomes and a wider economic slowdown.

Mervyn faces the Music

The Governor and his colleagues faced the press yesterday at the launch of the quarterly inflation report .... here is a selection of comments from them from questions fired from economics journalists, there is some great evaluation in here for AS and A2 economics students!

Surge in UK inflation

The latest figures for consumer price inflation were far worse that expected. Consumer prices increased by 0.8% in April taking the annual rate of inflation to 3.0% - right at the top of the level allowed by the government as part of the inflation target. Both goods and service price inflation moved higher as the UK economy struggles under a series of cost-push inflationary pressures. I have attached a PowerPoint file showing some of the key inflation charts.

China’s Inflation Problem

China’s inflation rate has climbed to a twelve year high with consumer prices 8.5 per cent higher than they were a year ago. Much of this is the result of the spiraling cost of food (22 per cent higher over the last twelve months).

Setting rates is no longer kids stuff

According to Roger Bootle writing in today’s Telegraph. The MPC does face an acute dilemma with evidence of surging cost push inflation and the real possibility (probability?) that CPI inflation will overshoot the 3% ceiling at some point in 2008. But Bootle argues that if the MPC is too cautious over interest rates, fearing a return to a wage-price spiral, then we might well suffer the slump in real output and jobs that characterised attempts to put the lid on rampant inflation in the 1970s and late 1980s.

Revision: Inflation Targets and Measurement

Here are a couple of useful revision resources on inflation:

No longer over a barrel?

David Smith turns his attention to oil prices in today’s Sunday Times and asks why the spiraling cost of crude has not hit global economic growth and inflation as much as in past oil shocks. Most of the recessions and major slowdowns in the global economy have been pre-dated by spikes in international commodity prices. Has oil now lost the power to shock?

Loss aversion and experiences of inflation

Few people believe that the officially published measure of inflation accurately captures their own experiences and problems - this is hardly a surprise since our own spending patterns will rarely correlate precisely with the weights used to calculate the consumer price and retail price index. But there is a real danger that the published inflation figures are losing credibility - and with it comes a risk of a larger-than-expected wage-price effect into 2009.

David Leonhardt writing in the New York Times links aspects of behavioural economics to the vexed question of just how high is inflation. A really interesting piece and well worth reading:

“Price increases are simply more noticeable — more salient, as psychologists would say — than price decreases. Part of this comes from the notion of loss aversion: human beings dislike a loss more than they like a gain of equivalent size. If you have to sell your house for less than you bought it for, you’re really unhappy. You hate that ground chuck now costs $2.83 a pound, but you didn’t notice that oranges are 31 percent cheaper than they were a year ago. There is also something particular to inflation that aggravates loss aversion. Price increases are obvious. But price declines are often hidden. The cost of an item stays about the same for years, while everything else gets more expensive and nominal incomes rise.”

The rest of his piece is here

Gordon’s economic history lesson

It cannot have been easy or much fun for the man. Gordon Brown’s appearance on the Andrew Marr show this morning was supposed to have been the start of the big fight-back after the appalling drubbing that he suffered at the polls on Thursday and Friday. But the garbled mixture of reassurance and platitudes about the government ‘feeling our pain’ was distinctly underwhelming. I winced ahfl way through the interview when Brown claimed that the last Labour government inherited high inflation from the Conservatives. This is simply not true. I applaud his decision to give independence to the Bank of England in May 1997, but low and (relatively) stable inflation did not appear miraculously when Blair walked into Number 10 that year - consumer price inflation (the government’s chosen emasure, but not one that most of us now look at with much credence) was already low for some years before 1997 as our chart shows. Inflation targets (introduced in the UK in 1992 after our departure from the ERM) and a favourable mix of disinflationary economic shocks, globalisation and the strong exchange rate combined to give Brown and his Treasury team an inheritance of low inflation when they came to power. Perhaps it was the stress that caused Brown to make such a shocking mistake in his attempt to teach us all a little economic history?

Cheaper sterling to the rescue?

For some time now I have been arguing that the media should be paying more attention to the exchange rate when considering the propsects for the UK economy over the coming months. A cheaper currency acts as a boost to exports and aggregate demand and can be a very useful stabiliser in an economy weakening from the fall-out from the credit crunch. There are naturally risks from a sharp downward movement in the exchange rate, not least the impact on the prices of imported products and possible flow-through effects on cost and price inflation. But taken as a whole, a lower exchange rate is what the UK economy needs at the moment - and we are getting it! Charles Bean, Chief Economist of the Bank of England made clear reference to this in an important speech in London today - it is available to download here from the Bank of England website. I have picked out one paragraph in particular which focuses on the exchange rate and compares the impact of cuts in interest rates with currency depreciations.