Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues appear to be winning over investors with the argument that the current surge in consumer prices won’t last.
On Thursday, when news broke that U.S. inflation climbed to 5% in May for the first time since 2008, yields on the key 10-year Treasury note moved in the opposite direction—falling to a three-month low of around 1.43%. And while bond-market gauges of expected inflation edged upward, they remained well short of this year’s high reached in May.
That sanguine reaction is probably welcome news for Fed officials ahead of next week’s interest-rate meeting. They’re widely expected to stick with an ultra-easy monetary stance, in pursuit of the twin goals of maximum employment and 2% average inflation. And they’ve been playing down risks that their policy could lead to a big and lasting overshoot on prices.
U.S. central bankers have been hammering home the message that higher inflation will mostly be transitory, the result of temporary bottlenecks as the economy reopens and low readings a year ago when it shut down.
‘Getting Comfortable’
“The best thing the Fed has done, the most effective, is that they stayed consistent around the transitory narrative,” said Peter Yi, director of short-duration fixed income and head of credit research at Northern Trust Asset Management, which oversees roughly $1 trillion.
Buttressing the Fed’s view, price increases in May were largely driven by categories where supply or demand has been skewed by the economy’s reopening, from used vehicles and household furnishings to airfares and apparel.
“A lot of the components that rose were the transitory ones,” said Yi. “More people in the market are now getting comfortable looking past these things.”
In a report to clients after the May data came out, JPMorgan Chase & Co. economist Daniel Silver agreed that the drivers of higher inflation are still mostly temporary—but added that “there is some firming taking place away from these factors as well,” pointing in particular to increases in rents.
Billionaire investor Stan Druckenmiller said the Fed’s easy-money measures have lulled investors into a false sense of security and distorted asset prices. “The market is not speaking right now,” Druckenmiller told CNBC television in an email Thursday.
In discussing the outlook for inflation, Fed officials have stressed the importance of expectations: If people believe that prices are headed sharply higher, they act in ways that help bring that about. So the absence of financial-market fears of a big run-up in prices is undoubtedly comforting.