We still don’t really know how inflation works
2024/6/26
Unexplainable
A
Adam Posen
C
Claudia Assam
D
Dylan Matthews
N
Noam Hassenfeld
Dylan Matthews：起初低估了2021年夏季通货膨胀的严重性，后承认预测错误并承担责任。他指出，包括他自己、美联储和私人银行在内，许多人都低估了通货膨胀的规模。
Noam Hassenfeld：探讨了通货膨胀的可控性及其背后的经济学谜团，并介绍了两种主要的通货膨胀理论。他总结了两种理论的优缺点，并指出两种理论都有一定的合理性，但目前尚无定论。
Larry Summers：认为需要失业率显著上升才能控制通货膨胀。
Adam Posen：强调了美联储沟通和公众信心的重要性，认为美联储通过影响公众预期来控制通货膨胀。他认为，美联储的政策具有心理层面上的作用，有效的经济政策需要有效的沟通，让公众相信政策的有效性。
Claudia Assam：质疑美联储对通货膨胀的影响力及其信息传递的有效性，认为普通民众并没有关注美联储的言论，因此美联储的政策对普通民众的影响有限。她认为，疫情后供应链的恢复是通货膨胀下降的主要原因，而不是美联储的政策。她强调，解决通货膨胀需要解决现实世界中的问题，而不能仅仅依赖美联储。
Dylan Matthews: I was skeptical in the summer of 2021 that prices would rise significantly in a way that would get out of control. And for better or worse, I have tried to be the latter type of reporter. And this is a case in which I owned it and I was wrong. If I'm being charitable to myself, which my therapist says I should be, I would say that most people were not anticipating the scale of inflation that we got. The Federal Reserve, private banks, the kind of people who predict these things, they weren't forecasting a big surge in inflation.
Noam Hassenfeld: This week, with inflation still at the top of so many people's minds, how much can we actually control it? Or as one economist I spoke to put it, What the heck just happened? And what could we possibly do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Larry Summers said things like this, that you would need to see unemployment rise significantly before you saw inflation come down. There's going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation. But inflation somehow went down. Inflation is coming down hard and it is coming down a lot faster than I think people thought. The two sides of that inflation-unemployment seesaw, they were both low. The theory turns out to be badly wrong. It turns out that you could have falling inflation without rising unemployment. If you look at most theories of inflation now, one of the variables that you will see trying to predict inflation is what people expect inflation to be. Expectations. Inflation somehow happens because people expect it to happen. And it goes away because people expect it to go away. When you expect more inflation, you do things that cause inflation. So as a worker, you might demand a raise because your prices are going to go up. And unless you get a raise, your standard of living is going to go down. When businesses expect future prices to go up across the board, they're going to raise their own prices to keep up. And if enough people and businesses are making those kinds of decisions based on their expectations of where the economy is going, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the Fed needed to get that credibility back, prove to people that these new interest rates had teeth and staying power. Essentially, the Fed anchored people's expectations. They convinced people that no matter what, they wouldn't let inflation spiral out of control. It's not the exact policy the Fed set. It's that they got people to trust them. According to this theory, the Fed isn't just controlling interest rates. They're shaping people's beliefs about the world, which they do by constantly being at the ready to adjust those interest rates. We don't know how long it takes people to change their mind about inflation. How much the path of past inflation affects their thinking about future inflation. We don't know how high interest rates have to go in order to anchor people's expectations. We don't know how long these expectations last. But in order for the plan to work, Adam didn't want to be honest about all that uncertainty. We decided that none of us would go out in public and start saying, well, I'm not sure this is going to work. Oh, I'm really uncertain about this part because then it was even less likely to work. So it's showing confidence to instill confidence. But according to Adam, the bigger, more enduring impact of raising interest rates might just be in how it makes people feel about the future. This feeling of trust in the people behind the curtain. So inflation is kind of a mystery. Even the smartest economists and Vox reporters struggle to get a handle on it sometimes. But more importantly, the rate hike reminded everyone that the Fed was in control, that people didn't need to worry, that they didn't need to ask for raises, that businesses didn't need to raise prices. No more inflation spiral. regular people are not listening to the Fed. And if they happen to hear them, you know, in the news, it's not like they're like, oh, wow, I've really got to change my behavior because of something the Fed says they're going to do six months, 12 months from now. It's just not plausible. But she just doesn't think the Fed brought down inflation by influencing regular people's expectations. I have a hard time when I do a reality, a gut check, that the words of the Fed on inflation get all the way down to the people, change the way they think about inflation and thus change their behavior and thus bring down inflation. It wasn't mainly the Fed pulling the strings. It was something a lot more concrete that happened around the same time. It was our collective emergence from the pandemic. It gave me the very obvious explanation is we are healing the supply problems that the pandemic caused. It was the supply chain slowly, finally coming back online. There was more production, which meant more stuff for people to buy with all that money. According to Claudia, the solution was in the real world, not the guy behind the curtain. There were all kinds of things that needed to be done to get the economy out of the COVID disruptions, and those have nothing to do with the Fed. The problem is the passage of time is not the best and least painful way to deal with inflation. We should not have the attitude of, oh, next time we have inflation, the Fed's got that. But Adam still believes in the swoop, in the power of the Fed, that expectations are what brought inflation down. I mean, the most powerful evidence for this is that we had the set of common shocks across Europe, Japan, U.S., U.K. But in all of them, once the central banks started raising rates, it all just came back down. We know it wasn't the seesaw effect that we talked about before. And then Adam says that when the Fed raised interest rates in 2022, that's what brought inflation down. It was a reminder that the Fed was in control and always ready to act, that the Fed is here and the Fed is powerful. I think there will be economists trying to come up with more and more clever ways to test which of those things are true and in what proportion, like decades and decades from now.
Adam Posen: Well, this is just all a communications message. So if you communicate to people that you believe something and they believe you, then it happens. But in order for the plan to work, Adam didn't want to be honest about all that uncertainty. We decided that none of us would go out in public and start saying, well, I'm not sure this is going to work. Oh, I'm really uncertain about this part because then it was even less likely to work. So it's showing confidence to instill confidence.
Claudia Assam: regular people are not listening to the Fed. And if they happen to hear them, you know, in the news, it's not like they're like, oh, wow, I've really got to change my behavior because of something the Fed says they're going to do six months, 12 months from now. It's just not plausible. But she just doesn't think the Fed brought down inflation by influencing regular people's expectations. I have a hard time when I do a reality, a gut check, that the words of the Fed on inflation get all the way down to the people, change the way they think about inflation and thus change their behavior and thus bring down inflation. It was our collective emergence from the pandemic. It gave me the very obvious explanation is we are healing the supply problems that the pandemic caused. There were all kinds of things that needed to be done to get the economy out of the COVID disruptions, and those have nothing to do with the Fed. The problem is the passage of time is not the best and least painful way to deal with inflation. We should not have the attitude of, oh, next time we have inflation, the Fed's got that.
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