"Bundesbank: no deflation in sight. Really?"

From Bond Vigilantes:

Today I came across an article in which the Bundesbank took the festive season as an opportunity to discuss if all the Christmas sales discounts are going to turn into a permanent phenomenon for the Eurozone. “No deflation in sight” (in German) concludes that the Eurozone is unlikely to experience continuously falling prices, ie deflation. The Bundesbank does however identify some parallels between today and the 1930s – the last period of deflation in Germany. The Bundesbank attributes the current disinflationary trend in the Eurozone to the austerity imposed on the peripheral economies. It is striking that this line of argument offers the opportunity to draw some historical parallels. In the early 1930s, chancellor Brüning’s retrenchment policies (in form of emergency decrees) in response to the global economic crisis and the perceived lack of German competitiveness included severe wage cuts for civil servants, public sector job cuts, reduction of pension payments and entitlements as well as higher income taxes.  These policies marked a period of severe economic downturn and deflation with major historical consequences.

However, the Bundesbank seems to take some comfort out of the fact that the deflationary experiences in the periphery have not been as severe as in Germany in the 1930s and not sufficient to drag the entire Eurozone into a deflationary spiral so far. The German central bank anticipates that the austerity measures will show their positive effects on the peripheral economic competitiveness soon which should pay off in form of a return to modest economic growth in 2014 and 2015. While the high unemployment rates in the Eurozone, and in the periphery in particular, will continue to ease any inflationary pressure, the paper concludes that the pickup in economic activity will provide an anchor to the downside. In other words, the worst is over, and that’s why there is no deflation in sight. SocGen’s Sebastian Galy critically points out that the Bundesbank bases much of its analysis on the assumption of a strong positive correlation between growth and inflation which historically has not always been evident and doesn’t seem to be consistent with the trend of disinfloyment that the US is currently experiencing....MORE