> How can rates come down? The present uncertainty around tariffs and a potential crisis could create conditions that pressure interest rates downward before those Treasury securities mature, by influencing Federal Reserve policy.
Rising prices due to tariffs won't pressure the Fed to lower interest rates. It will increase inflation and worries of inflation, which will actually pressure the Fed to RAISE interest rates. A slowing economy won't stop inflation... We are likely entering into a period of "stagflation". The way out last time was very high interest rates and short term economic hardship.
Prices rising due to tariffs isn't "inflation" in any traditional sense. It's not driven by consumer demand, and therefore the logic for raising rates (i.e. slowing economic growth by reducing money in the market) doesn't apply.
> Prices rising due to tariffs isn't "inflation" in any traditional sense.
Yes, consumer prices rising is inflation in the traditional sense (since, unqualified, “inflation” refers to increases in consumer prices.)
> It's not driven by consumer demand,
Inflation is not restricted to demand-pull inflation, which is why the term “demand-pull inflation” has a reason to exist.
Tariff-driven price increases are a form of cost-push inflation.
> and therefore the logic for raising rates (i.e. slowing economic growth by reducing money in the market) doesn't apply.
The existence of cost-push inflation doesn't change the short-term marginal effects of monetary policy on prices, so of you care just about near-term price levels, the same monetary interventions make sense as for demand-pull inflation.
OTOH, beyond short-term price effects things are very different: demand-pull inflation frequently is a symptom of strong economic growth and cooling the economy can still be consistent with acceptable growth.
Cost-push inflation tends to be an effect of forces outside of monetary policy which tend to slow the economy, so throwing tight money policy on top of it accelerates the slowdown. This is particularly bad if you are already in a recession with cost-push inflation (stagflation).
The good thing, such as it is, about cost-push inflation where the cost driver is a clear policy like tariffs, is that while monetary policy has no good option to fix it, there is a very clear policy solution—stop the policy that is driving the problem.
The problem is when there is irrational attachment to that policy in the current government.
You're just using new terms ("cost-push inflation") to disagree without actually disagreeing.
> so of you care just about near-term price levels, the same monetary interventions make sense as for demand-pull inflation....Cost-push inflation tends to be an effect of forces outside of monetary policy which tend to slow the economy, so throwing tight money policy on top of it accelerates the slowdown. This is particularly bad if you are already in a recession with cost-push inflation (stagflation).
Again, you're just saying the same thing that I wrote above, but arguing (?) that it's actually called "inflation".
If your point is that tariffs are bad, fine. We both agree that what you call "cost-push inflation" is not something you'd rationally raise interest rates to counter.
Increasing cost of imported goods will increase demand on equivalent domestically produced goods, which are also often supply constrained. Locally produced goods will increase their prices as much as the market allows (which is somewhere around the cost of the imported good with the tariff). Tariffs cause inflation as a whole.
When the tariffs are dropped, do you think the price of the imported good is going to go back to the original price? If the domestically produced version is priced near the tariff price, they'll reprice slightly lower than the domestic price, ensuring prices stay high.
If a pair of shoes today costs $30, and a pair of shoes tomorrow costs $60 (not saying this will happen, just positing a scenario), from a consumer perspective, there has been 100% inflation in the price of shoes. It doesn't matter that the price increase is due to tarrifs on imports from Vietnam.
I'm an American that owns/operates a design and manufacturing company -- we build customer products in China and export to USA buyers. Let's say we build the customer product and sell it to them for $20 ex-works China. That means USA customer must pick it up at our dock and pay the shipping fee. Lets ignore the shipping fee to keep it simple. Assume USA customer currently sells the product for $80 in USA. If USA customer now needs to pay 35% import tariffs on $20/unit, then their cost goes up $7 USD. If USA customer passes 100% of that cost to their own final end customer, then they need to start selling it for $87 USD. So 35% tariff ultimately turns into a price increase of 8.75% for consumers.
But actually, tariffs have been 10-25% anyway for a number of years. So for existing products, some tariff cost was already included in that $7 total tariff cost. So, for existing products, the cost may go up ~$3.50 and our customer would sell it for ~$83.50 and the actual increase consumers would see is ~ 4.5% increase.
Now, this is a typical pricing scenario for our USA customers, they are selling individual products that cost $20 in China at volume, in USA at retail for ~3x-5x the per unit purchase cost from China, this is quite common. Now, the USA customer must buy ~5000pcs to get that $20 USD unit cost, while consumers get to buy only 1pcs and pay $87 USD, whether or not that is fair pricing given the risks and R&D costs, that's just the reality. Anyway, I'm not sure of the ex-works cost of shoes, but I'm highly confident big brands like Nike sell them for at least 5X the ex-works cost. So the math would be similar.
Yes and there will be the usual political consequences associated with inflation; but this type of inflation is caused by a tax and cannot be combated by raising interest rates.
Why wouldn't a rate hike make a difference? It will lower demand and therefore prices, no? I mean, this isn't really something that we should celebrate or want, since it essentially just means discouraging people from buying shoes because they can't afford it, but it does bring the prices down (or at least slow the rate of shoe price increase).
A couple of things. In practice, most goods are actually priced as cost-plus, with very thin margins, and any response in prices is highly asymmetric.
If the purchase costs for a good suddenly increase, retailers will increase prices very quickly because they would otherwise start losing money very quickly.
If demand for goods decreases, that doesn't affect the retailer's cost of goods at all, and if they were to reduce their prices, they'd eliminate their thin margins. From their perspective, it's better to sit on inventory for a while.
So any downward pressure on prices would happen much more slowly.
BTW, this kind of asymmetry is why a bit of inflation is good, actually. Inflation acts as a universal and permanent downward pressure on (real) prices, in the sense that if retailers and others are unable to justify an increase in nominal prices to their customers, their real prices will drop.
True but that mechanism is indirect at best. Usually high interest rates discourages more borrowing and lowers spending that way.
But in this case the price increase is already due to the government putting its thumb on the scale. The best way to reduce the price is not via the Rube Goldberg interest rate mechanism to shrink spending and thus demand for the $60 shoe, but by removing the tariff and make it a $30 shoe immediately.
I 100% agree with you, but the Fed is independent and they only have a few levers to pull.
They don't make policy and they go out of their way to not comment on policy. They say they are apolitical (though of course they are 100% pro-establishment).
If the entire government was working together, yeah, sure, your theory holds. But that isn't how things work.
It's only inflation if you also double your earnings (tongue in cheek, this takes obviously place on a macro scale). This is about balancing costs. Globalization created environmental externalities that are not sustainable. While you enjoy the $30 pair of shoes, the people by the factories suffer.
Almost nobody importing goods is really checking the supply chains properly enough. We have pretty strict EPA laws here that are a tariff in their own way.
If the consumer price index, which is a metric the Fed uses, goes up, then inflation has gone up. Every dollar buys you less (less purchasing power), and the nominal price has increased. To me this indicates inflation. Of course, you need to calculate how this balances out in terms of jobs/wages and the flow of investment, but that's really hard to figure out at this point in time.
I'd expect the CPI to go up in the event of global tariffs at a baseline of 10% assuming all things go ahead as described.
Yes, that's fine. But if the acute cause is not consumer demand, raising interest rates won't do anything.
(Note: a sibling comment suggests that it "doesn't matter", because if you slow the economy enough, you'll offset the artificial "inflation" due to tariffs. Maybe so. But that would be cutting off your arm to treat a paper cut.)
But the acute cause is consumer demand. If the consumer reacted by not buying the tariffed stuff there would be no cause for alarm. But no, they continue to buy the higher priced goods. I'm not sure what happens next, but it seems if that is allowed to continue some sort of feedback loops develops leading to inflation getting out of control. We've seen that happen often enough, and the effects are devastating. So devastating governments use the interest rate hammer despite knowing it will likely get them thrown out of office, which is what happened to Biden.
The interest rates hikes (again for reasons I don't understand) effectively suppress demand. But it isn't necessarily demand for the tariffed goods, it's overall demand. Typically what you see drop is advertising, restaurants and similar discretionary spending. Notice they are services - not tariffed goods. This brings down spending to match income, and which somehow keeps inflation dragon in it's box.
In other words, the point of raising interest rates isn't to cure the tariffs. The only thing that can do that is to remove them. Instead it's to counter the effects of the tariffs - which is that they have made the economy less efficient, in the sense in the consumers can purchase less stuff with the money they have in their pocket. The consumers are in a very real sense poorer. The interest rates are just a hammer to ensure they act like they are poorer, and buy less stuff, and bring the economy back into balance. They react to being beaten with that hammer by voting out the party that chose to hit them with it. But it was for the own good, and so the political party deploying it has effectively decided to take one for the team. For all the cynicism our political systems and the politicians cop, I sometimes think they are undervalued. (But only sometimes, and only some of them.)
I suspect Trump is thinking "but the money hasn't been destroyed - I've now got it". And that's true. The effect of the tariffs is to divert trillions of dollars (by Trump's calculations) to the USA federal government. Before the citizens of the USA were free to spend that money as they see fit. Now they have handed over to Trump, and so have have effectively lost a freedom they once had.
If you look at other economies around the wold that have dragged themselves up by the bootstraps by imposing tariffs, like say China of Singapore, they poured that money into infrastructure, education and R&D. Maybe spending it in that way is perhaps more productive than letting Joe Sixpack using it to pay for takeout. I dunno.
Admittedly it's still an open question, but to me it seems the odds of Trump spending the money in that way is remote given he is currently cutting back on those very things. Perhaps even more telling is the USA go to be the most powerful economy on the planet by explicitly not letting government decide on where surplus money should be invested, but rather leaving that decision to it's capitalist economy. As it is, Trump is moving the USA from a capitalist economy to a command economy, with him in command.
Amazing stuff to see. I'm glad I'm watching from afar.
I would be ready and prepared to sacrifice a fair amount of my quality of life for the greater good (of being more self-reliant, more secure, bringing some manufacturing back on shore, etc, etc).
But these guys have basically said "we're all going to have to suffer, and then..." nothing! No huge capital investments into green energy. No workforce retraining. No infrastructure. Nothing. So yeah, you're asking me to sacrifice my quality of life? For what? Ew, no thanks!
Of course, I'm pretty confident I know where this money is going to go: contracts and grants to private corporations owned by Trump's personal network. They are already prepping for this by gutting huge swathes of the federal government. When they say "actually, we think some of these functions were necessary after all, but for efficiency reasons, it's best that private companies take over these functions..." naturally those contracts will go to the right people who are capable of making america great again.
It's actually insane, it has me absolutely livid about this whole situation. Sorry, I do not care how anyone feels about "the libs." These people are going to steal the quality of life -- that my parents built, that my grandparents fought a war to create -- from me and my children. They will use it to enrich themselves. They will burn the this country to the ground to accomplish this.
One way around this might be a twist on Goodhart’s Law: if you come after the people at BLS who produce the CPI [0], and replace them with political appointees, then maybe you can arrive at an “improved” CPI that hews more closely to your political desires. Assuming you’re the kind of leader who privileges optics over high-fidelity data.
The fact that we decided allow a massive tax increase by executive fiat is irrelevant. The fact that we’re risking a death spiral from decreased consumer demand via government imposed inflation is irrelevant.
You’re right in that the usual formula of turning the knobs on interest rates to ease economic challenges is unlikely to work. We may have to turn the knobs to prevent a total death spiral, however. Get ready for 16% mortgages.
It doesn't matter what the root cause of increasing prices is. Fed doesn't have any other levers but to adjust rates up to reduce demand. It will work either way because even if demand is not the source, it will reduce whatever demand that was there.
You can’t isolate these things, the Fed’s charter is to try and reduce inflation for consumers not regulate the bond market for the US debt, but their interest rates and repo actions move the bond market.
Actually, price increases caused by tariffs are a type of inflation—specifically, cost-push inflation. This is consistent with standard definitions found in macroeconomics and international economics textbooks.
Inflation is definitely going to happen due to tariffs. If I'm paying 20% more next year on average for products above what I'm currently paying that is 20% inflation for me, that is what people will see; they don't care about your purist form of inflation arguments. They also vote against people who cause inflation, especially when they promised the opposite.
It doesn't matter what causes inflation. It's always a sign that there's more money than is needed for current and anticipated levels of economic activity. And the correct course of action is always to raise the rates to reduce the pace that the money is printed at.
At least if you care about avoiding hyperinflation.
The logic is very reductive. It's like: "the Fed's job is to cut a snake, so if they see a snake around their head they'll just close their eyes and cut both".
Raising rates does Absolutely Nothing to undo the tariffs or bringing the price down. Fed is not a blind machine.
+1. In my relatively uninformed opinion what trump is doing is accelerating a kind of global arbitration in which the US is no longer the dominant economic power. We are going to have to share our toys. The “3rd world” is developing and it isn’t as easy to bully the globe into doing all our dirty work.
In my imagination, 50 years from now we will have a quality of life more similar to Central Europe: fine, but nothing special. Most people will live much more simply, rent smaller spaces, drive less ostentatious cars that they share. People will live with their families out of necessity and strawberries won’t be available in December.
Since people won't actually have more money to spend, you would expect it to lower the prices of other things like housing or travel. So there should be a negligible impact on inflation depending on the weighting.
This is flat out wrong. The Fed raises and lowers interest rates to stimulate or tamp down demand. Raising interest rates because prices rise while demand drops due to a trade war would accomplish nothing.
> The Fed has two mandates: maximum employment & stable prices.
It actually has three listed in the Federal Reserve Act:
* Maximum employment
* Stable prices
* Moderate long-term interest rates
It's popularly called a “dual mandate” because it is perceived that properly balancing the first two will naturally also achieve the third.
> If prices go up, the Fed is mandated to raise interest rate.
No, it isn't, especially if employment is already below the “full employment” level and expected to drop even without the rate hike. Demand-pull inflation in periods of strong employment and economic growth or looming deflation in periods of weak enoloyment and economic growth are easy-mode monetary policy choices (at least as to direction, magnitude may be tricky).
But tariff-induced cost-push inflation in weak growth slowing employment conditions, where Congress and the President decline to remove the non-monetary policy root cause, that’s hard-mode monetary policy, because the usual tools to address either the employment or price problem will make the other worse.
They're mandated to raise interest rates in the event of structural inflation, not in the event of a one-time increase in prices. It would be silly if the government increasing the VAT required the fed to increase interest rates.
Even if the tariffs work as desired, they result in persistently higher prices. Unless you're expecting American laborers to work for less than literal Chinese robots, I guess.
Right, I’m just saying that raising interest rates in response to that doesn’t make any sense. It would be functionally equivalent to raising interest rates as a response to an increase in the income tax rate in order to restore the buying power of your pre-tax-increase income.
Link seems broken? From what I’ve seen of what Powell has said, it seems to track with my post, e.g. “Our obligation is to keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored to make certain that a one-time increase in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem,”
i.e. It’s not the price increases directly caused by a tariff or sales tax that they’re trying to prevent, it’s any knock-off effect in price expectations that causes additional inflation.
The dual mandate makes plenty of sense when you realize that the Fed and monetary policy aren't intended to be the whole of economic policy, and that the actual main piece of economic policy is with Congress and fiscal policy.
The first sentence is right. The second is wrong, as implied by the first. If raising interest rates would exacerbate a recession and thereby unemployment, the fed will not do it just because prices are rising. You are ignoring half of their mandate.
The Fed has a mandate to keep inflation under control but a lot of leeway to decide if they should increase interest rates or not. If they see a price increase as temporary or structural, and not based on an interest-rate-responsive process, they will not increase rates. Some prices are "sticky", some are definitely not.
No - because generally there will be a lot more folks in the labor market with less leverage so they will not need to pay more in order to attract the talent they need. This is also why inflation is typically solved by recessions. They reduce labor demand which reduces wages which (generally) reduces the price of producing things overall.
1) Economic/Monetary Inflation, which is an increase in the money supply in an economy driven by government or central bank ("print money").
2) Price Inflation, which is an increase in the general price level of goods and services that people typically notice at the groceries or gas and usually derives from monetary inflation, but can also be due to the new tariffs.
Is the Fed going to do the same confusion and use 2 to justify higher rates for longer?
I think they shouldn't unless they're being disingenuous and politically motivated (push just enough to make the entire Trump mandate an unending crisis until Democrats get back in power).
According to monetarist theory these two things are one and the same.
The main source of "money printing" is banks making loans. And this is what the Fed targets when it raises interest rates.
I'm not quite sure whether tariffs really do lead to inflation. It depends on how consumers and companies respond to higher prices of imported goods and to the general sense of uncertainty.
It's not something I was aware of until recently, but I was surprised that it was not more under the control of the government and central bank (in the UK, anyway, if it turns out it's different in the US).
Interestingly that paper from the Bank of England makes no mention of "fractional reserve" anywhere, but they do say:
>Another common misconception is that the central bank
determines the quantity of loans and deposits in the
economy by controlling the quantity of central bank money
— the so-called ‘money multiplier’ approach
>While the money multiplier theory can be a useful way of
introducing money and banking in economic textbooks, it is
not an accurate description of how money is created in reality.
Rather than controlling the quantity of reserves, central banks
today typically implement monetary policy by setting the
price of reserves — that is, interest rates.
>In reality, neither are reserves a binding constraint on lending,
nor does the central bank fix the amount of reserves that are
available
Anyway, I think I'm digressing from the topic a bit here - but I _think_ what I've learned recently is that in the UK it isn't actually fractional reserve banking, which I was surprised by.
>but I _think_ what I've learned recently is that in the UK it isn't actually fractional reserve banking, which I was surprised by.
The BoE doesn't currently impose a mandatory reserve requirement. They do have more general liquidity requirements though (central bank reserves being one possible source of liquidity). I would still see it as a fractional reserve banking system, especially as these minor differences don't matter for the question of how money is created.
Yeah I think that's a fair shout, the main element being that private banks create the money via loans. Thanks for engaging, I appreciate the discussion. One day I might grok how modern economies hang together, but I've a way to go yet.
>I'm not quite sure whether tariffs really do lead to inflation. It depends on how consumers and companies respond to higher prices of imported goods and to the general sense of uncertainty.
They won't absorb the new costs. That has not happened in the history of capitalism as far as I am aware. Higher costs will inevitably equate to higher prices without an offset somewhere.
Investors don't like unpredictability, which Trump has already shown to be very unpredictable in regards to tariffs (the whole on again off again stance changes for example).
Higher prices also lead to less buying activity. History has proven this out too.
If you mean that importers will not absorb costs then I agree. They will pass on most of the costs, if not immediately (to avoid sticker shock) then over a period of time.
But the question is what happens to demand for imported goods and demand for everything else. At constant money supply, prices of some goods going up could put pressure on the price of other goods and services, although this seems less likely as the tariffs are so extremely broad.
A lot depends on how people respond. Will they reduce saving to pay higher prices? Will they take out loans to maintain living standards (creating new money in the process)? Or will they cut back on spending causing a recession?
And what will companies do? Will projects be put on hold because the return on investment is too unpredictable? What happens to the dollar? Will Trump cut other taxes to offset his tax hikes on imports? What about the massive budget deficit?
Consumers will pull back, if not right away it will show up with 18 months, though early indications suggest they already are to brace for the price increases as most were already trying to simply get ahead of the last few years of inflation to begin with.
Businesses are already cutting back. My employer has already talked about the impact, I know other people who are saying the same thing. Lots of things going into freeze or slowing down. It will take a minute for this to get through the economy but it absolutely will.
I don’t think this is highly uncertain territory, history has clear examples of what will happen if in doubt. Generally, it’s not good for most, especially consumers or those who have any reliance on foreign material or goods, which nowadays is most businesses and consumers, and the US won’t be able to magically fill that in.
> I think they shouldn't unless they're being disingenuous and politically motivated (push just enough to make the entire Trump mandate an unending crisis until Democrats get back in power).
They've been saying since the Biden administration they are going to keep raising rates. If the Trump regime's choices drive us into an unending crisis, bailing him out with rate cuts would be the politically motivated choice. Continuing to raise rates is just sticking to principles.
That’s a speculative article that was wrong. I was also somewhat misremembering JPow saying he wouldn’t cut rates after the inauguration as him saying he was going to raise them. Rates changed a small amount in September, then they did two big cuts after the election. Not really evidence of political bias in any case.
The gist is that Republicans are going to blame the Fed of playing politics when I terest rates are lowered, and blame Biden for when interest rates rose. Rates go up, Bidens fault, rates go down - politics. That is the republican talking point. The article ascribes no direct motive but says the reduction in rates is due to the fed claiming victory on inflation. Which, was wel down and approaching target when the fed started cutting rates.
It is ironic that an article that says (paraphrasing) "here is what the political talking point would be", be used as __evidence__ for that talking point.
> How can rates come down? The present uncertainty around tariffs and a potential crisis could create conditions that pressure interest rates downward before those Treasury securities mature, by influencing Federal Reserve policy.
Rising prices due to tariffs won't pressure the Fed to lower interest rates. It will increase inflation and worries of inflation, which will actually pressure the Fed to RAISE interest rates. A slowing economy won't stop inflation... We are likely entering into a period of "stagflation". The way out last time was very high interest rates and short term economic hardship.