Good News on Inflation

We live in a world when most people, myself included, just assume the government is going to fuck things up worse when they try to fix problems.

But when they don’t we are pleasantly surprised. Sometimes the technocrats get things right, and their actions can be appropriate, putting just enough pressure on inflation by raising interest rates but not enough to send the economy crashing into a recession. I’ve been watching the actions of the fed, and are really surprised how they’ve managed to hike rates enough to put a cool on inflation but not slam the economy into a recession, like was common in the early 1950s battling the inflation post-World War II.

If anything, I would have thought the federal reserve would have been too tough on inflation, over-cooling the economy by too big of rate hikes, in part because they wanted to punish Democrats and the Biden administration. But it seems like they’ve taken a measured approach to raising central bank rates, carefully raising and pausing rate increases when it seems like caution is warranted.

Maybe the federal reserve really does take it’s mandate seriously, and isn’t influenced by politics like during the lead up to the 1972 election, with them taking the brakes off inflation to help the Nixon administration in their re-election battle, stimulating the economy but also setting in motion the conditions of an overheated economy that crashed hard against the reality of the first oil embargo in October 1973. Or maybe we are reading too much into short-term conditions.

Usually though the worse economic conditions are unleashed in the autumn months, when investor moods are unsettled by the shortening daylight and cooler weather to come — and fear of a bad Christmas shopping season. So maybe we are beyond the worse of it, until next autumn when we should be concerned again. But then again, short-term market trends are always wildly unpredictable, and previous results to not necessarily ensure something couldn’t go wrong in the coming months.

But that’s why one should be in the market for the long-term, and not pay too much attention to the ups and downs that are a normal part of the economic cycle.