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Jay Powell’s speech on Friday told investors what they wanted to hear — interest rates are going lower.
But the Fed chair’s direct message to markets also included some discussion about one of the more amorphous pillars of Fed policy: inflation expectations.
As Powell said, inflation expectations are of “critical importance” for the central bank to achieve its price stability goal of inflation that averages 2%.
If inflation expectations rise too much, prices could spiral as consumers buy more and businesses invest more today amid fears of even higher prices tomorrow. Should expectations fall too far, consumers and businesses may pull back and await expected lower prices in the future.
The problem for the Fed is that the public’s experience of inflation is mostly shaped by one thing: gas prices.
And though the central bank focuses on “core” measures of inflation that strip out food and gas, Powell is well aware of the limitations of this approach.
During a press conference in 2022, the Fed chair said, “The public doesn’t distinguish between core and headline inflation in their thinking.”
Longer-term inflation expectations haven’t given the Fed too much trouble through its recent rate-hiking cycle. Short-term expectations, however, had the central bank under pressure during the summer of 2022, when one-year expectations hit a 40-year high just months before inflation reached the same ignominious milestone.
Which suggests perhaps no institution would benefit more than the Fed from the auto industry’s shift toward electric vehicles and away from internal combustion engines.
The problem is the shift doesn’t quite seem to be on. And the shape of this transition is being hardened outside the home, anyway.
Last week’s announcement from Ford (F) that the company will invest in additional hybrid vehicles instead of all-electric SUVs suggests the industry’s move to an electric future will take longer than some expected.
A Yahoo Finance-Ipsos poll last year found that 57% of Americans had no plans to make an EV their next car. And as Bank of America analyst John Murphy noted following last week’s news, “Ford is experiencing a quicker transition to EVs among its commercial customers.”
The public’s experience of how quickly we’re moving toward an electric future might be defined by counting Teslas (TSLA) on the road. But the vehicle that dropped off your latest Amazon package might be a better read on where those ambitions lie.
For the Fed’s part, it seems unlikely that under Jay Powell’s leadership the central bank will look at energy policy as a catalyst for better monetary policy outcomes.
As Powell said in a speech last year, “Without explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools to promote a greener economy or to achieve other climate-based goals. We are not, and will not be, a ‘climate policymaker.'”
It would be surprising if this approach didn’t outlast Powell’s current tenure.
But to hear Powell tell it last week, nothing was more important to the Fed’s success in bringing down inflation without inflicting big damage on the labor market than well-anchored inflation expectations.
And the less gas Americans have to put in their cars, the more firmly those anchors can hold.
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