Do falling commodity prices imply disinflation ahead?
Cost pressures at the manufacturing level appear to be easing—at least, so say the manufacturers in our Business Inflation Expectations survey. In June, manufacturers reported that unit costs were up only 1.3 percent over the last 12 months, a full percentage point below their assessment at the end of last year. Retailers, on the other hand, report unit cost increases of 2.1 percent, down a bit from May, but 0.3 percentage points higher than in December.
We put a special question to our panel in June that may shed a little light on these patterns. When we asked firms to tell us what has been driving their unit costs over the past 12 months, manufacturers saw considerably less pressure coming from their cost of materials compared with other firms. Perhaps this discovery isn't very surprising. After all, commodity prices have been falling pretty sharply of late, and these costs are especially influential to manufacturers' assessment of the cost environment. (Indeed, in response to a special question we asked our panel in March, manufacturers ranked materials costs as the number-one influence on their pricing decisions.)
Does the fall in commodity prices mean we can expect a pass-through of these lower costs to consumers?
Perhaps. There's certainly a strong intuitive appeal to the "pipeline" theory of inflation. Here's the idea as described by the Bank of England (BOE):
"Consumer prices…can be thought of as the end of a 'pipeline' of costs and prices. The final price will be made up of many different components of cost as well as the retailer's profit or margin… Prices at one stage of the pipeline become costs for the next stage…"But economists who have looked down the inflation pipeline haven't found flows, but rather trickles. Years ago, Todd Clark of the Cleveland Fed put it this way while he was at the Kansas City Fed: "the empirical evidence… shows the production chain only weakly links consumer prices to producer prices."...MORE
