THE FRISSON of relief among some of America’s most outspoken left-leaning economists is unmistakable.Whenever other countries report high inflation figures, they seize on it as evidence that America’s own bout of price rises is part of a global trend.“I hate to ruin the victory lap of all the people boasting that Biden’s Recovery Act would be inflationary, but the UK also had a big jump in inflation, with no big stimulus,” tweeted Dean Baker of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, a think-tank, on November 17th.A few days earlier Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, made a similar comparison between Europe and America.
“What’s happening in the United States isn’t mainly about policy,” he concluded.That argument, if correct, carries extraordinary economic and political significance.Economically, the implication would be that inflation is largely out of the hands of American officials.
They can take steps to help ports and highways flow more smoothly, but ultimately they, like their counterparts elsewhere, are hostage to pandemic-induced disruptions to global supply chains.Central bankers, in this view, should be cautious about increasing interest rates, as that would do nothing to boost production, the nub of today’s problems.And politically, it would insulate President Joe Biden from criticism that the giant spending package he launched earlier this year caused America’s price woes.
Are these economists right? Is America’s inflation, now running at its fastest in three decades, global or homegrown? The case for the former is straightforward.
Most rich countries, from Britain to Australia, face similar pressures.Even Germany, renowned for its aversion to price rises, has seen inflation race to a 28-year high.
One common denominator is snarled supply chains , which have made everything from cars to furniture both scarcer and dearer.Another commonality is the pandemic’s lingering impact on the labour market.On November 19th Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said that higher prices for services reflect job vacancies in contact-intensive workplaces such as restaurants.The diagnosis applies just as well to America.
Simply put, life is not yet back to normal, and inflation is a symptom .
This global perspective is unquestionably important.
Yet it is insufficient: inflation is now higher in America than in any other advanced economy, by some distance.Although consumer prices in America rose by 6.2% in October compared with the year before, faster than in other big rich economies, year-on-year comparisons are flawed because of variations across countries in the timing of their pandemic-induced slowdowns and recoveries.The clearest comparison is instead to look at prices today and those 24 months ago.On this basis, consumer prices are up by about 7.5% in America, more than two percentage points higher than anywhere else in the G7 group of rich countries (see chart 1).
The case that this is at least partially homemade points to America’s unusually forceful pro-growth policies throughout the pandemic.
These started with the stimulus cheques that President Donald Trump proudly signed and grew even more generous with Mr Biden’s American Rescue Plan .Over the course of 2020 and 2021 America’s fiscal deficit is on track to average about 14% of GDP, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office.As with inflation, that is higher than in any other G7 country.
The Federal Reserve has also stood out for its ultra-loose policies, such as its bond-buying.The assets on the Fed’s balance-sheet have doubled over the past two years as a share of GDP.
This month the Fed started to pare back bond purchases, but financial conditions remain extremely loose, with real interest rates well into negative territory.
The remarkable degree of stimulus helps explain the boom in American retail sales.There is no doubt that the pandemic has shifted consumption from services towards goods.Yet even allowing for this distortion, the American data are jaw-dropping.In the second quarter of 2021 spending on durable goods was roughly a third higher than in the final quarter of 2019, far above its previous trend and easily outpacing the increases in other big economies (see chart 2).
Indeed, buoyant American demand may well have exacerbated global shortages and spilled over into higher inflation elsewhere.Consider maritime shipments.Port throughput in America was 14% higher in the second quarter of 2021 than in 2019.Other parts of the world have been more subdued: throughput in Europe was 1% lower.But shipping rates everywhere have soared as capacity has been diverted to transpacific trade.
It’s never too late
Recognising that inflation in America stems in part from its stimulus policies does not mean that those policies were necessarily bad.
They were directly responsible for the vigour of its economic rebound and its rapid drop in unemployment.Yet as time goes on, the downsides of supersized stimulus are becoming more apparent.Inflation is already eroding the real value of big wage gains for low-income Americans.
The threat of a wage-price spiral, not seen in America since the 1970s, looms over the recovery.
If ultra-loose policies helped cause inflation in the first place, it stands to reason that tighter policies ought to figure in the solution.
The Fed is gradually moving in that direction.On November 19th two of its governors, Richard Clarida and Christopher Waller, speaking at separate events, said that the central bank’s next meeting in December may include a discussion on whether to scale back its monthly asset purchases more swiftly.That, in turn, would clear the path for interest-rate increases in the first half of 2022, sooner than many economists expect.
Mr Biden, for his part, has adjusted his tone on inflation.As recently as July he described the jump in prices as temporary, a by-product of the pandemic.In recent weeks he has instead been forthright in saying how much inflation hurts Americans and declaring that “reversing this trend is a top priority”.
What can the president do to lower prices? Some of his actions have been more performative than substantive.On November 17th Mr Biden asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether oil and gas companies had colluded in raising prices at the pump.
Past such investigations have yielded little.On November 9th the White House announced an “action plan” to expand port capacity, but that could take years to bear fruit.Mr Biden could remove tariffs on Chinese products to help lower import prices.Yet that could be construed as a win for China, politically untenable in America these days.
In one respect, however, Mr Biden has done the right thing, if only by default.As his pandemic stimulus expires, fiscal policy is naturally getting stingier.The Hutchins Centre, a think-tank, calculates that this tightening could lop about two percentage points off America’s growth rate next year.Critics have argued that an ambitious social-spending and climate package—the cornerstone of Mr Biden’s agenda, currently wending its way through Congress—would add to inflationary pressures.
But its investments will be spread out over a decade, adding up to less than 1% of GDP each year.
That will deliver only a modest upfront kick to growth and have a negligible impact on prices.“My landmark legislation is relatively insignificant in the near term” would not make for a great political slogan.But after 18 months of big government spending, it is just what the American economy needs.
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