Here's The Economist doing some harping (Nov. 9):
In both America and Europe central bankers should be pushing prices upwards
WHAT is a central banker’s main job? Ask the man on the street and the chances are he will say something like “keeping a lid on inflation”. In popular perception, and in their own minds, central bankers are the technicians who squeezed high inflation out of the rich world’s economies in the 1980s; whose credibility is based on keeping it down; and who must therefore always be on guard lest prices start to soar. Yet this view is dangerously outdated. The biggest problem facing the rich world’s central banks today is that inflation is too low.
The average inflation rate in the mostly rich-world OECD is 1.5%, down from 2.2% in 2012 and well below central banks’ official targets (typically 2% or just under). The drop is most perilous in the euro area: annual consumer-price inflation was only 0.7% in October, down from 2.5% a year ago. That is partly because commodity prices have been falling, but even if you strip out volatile food and fuel prices, the euro zone’s underlying or “core” inflation is 0.8%, as low as it has ever been since the single currency began. In America the headline rate in September was 1.2%, down from 2% in July—and the core rate, as defined by the Federal Reserve, has stubbornly stayed at 1.2%, close to its low point. There were inklings this week that some at the Fed want even looser monetary policy. True, things are improving in Japan, which seems finally to have escaped 15 years of falling prices, but even there underlying inflation is still only zero. The only big, rich economy where prices are rising at a clip is Britain, where overall inflation is 2.7%.
That sinking feelingThese are depressing numbers (see article). The most obvious danger of too-low inflation is the risk of slipping into outright deflation, when prices persistently fall. As Japan’s experience shows, deflation is both deeply damaging and hard to escape in weak economies with high debts. Since loans are fixed in nominal terms, falling wages and prices increase the burden of paying them. And once people expect prices to keep falling, they put off buying things, weakening the economy further. There is a real danger that this may happen in southern Europe. Greece’s consumer prices are now falling, as are Spain’s if you exclude the effect of one-off tax increases.
In America and northern Europe deflation is less of an immediate risk. Most economies are growing, albeit slowly. And surveys show consumers still expect medium-term inflation to be at or above the central banks’ target of 2%. But if an economy with high unemployment grows too slowly for too long, prices and wages are eventually likely to fall. In Japan deflation did not set in until seven years after the asset bubble burst....MORE
