Is European Money Growth Helping Stoke U.S. Inflation?
The monthly European M2 numbers are out (they are released with approximately a one-month lag), and so we can get a look at the monetary conditions through the end of October.
The chart above (source: FRB and ECB) shows that whatever the ECB is claiming about not conducting QE, money supply growth is most definitely accelerating.
The data also allows me to update one of my current-favorite charts, showing the connection between developed markets money growth (proxied here by US M2 plus Euro M2) and core U.S. inflation. The chart is below (source: BLS, FRB, ECB, Enduring Investments calculations).
What is most amazing to me about this pretty reasonable (correlation= 0.6) relationship is that it is contemporaneous. This is really important, because what it means is that we can argue that money velocity may not actually have fallen in the U.S. as much as it is commonly believed to have. If the proper measure, now that all of our economies are so interconnected, is global money rather than narrowly domestic money, then one answer to the question "why did the 10% growth in the U.S. money supply not lead to much higher inflation, much higher real growth, or both" (the correlation between U.S. M2 growth and U.S. core inflation is only 0.44) could be "because Europe's tight money was counterbalancing our loose money."
If this speculation is right, then it makes the ubiquity of QE much more worrisome, because it means that even if the Fed stops throwing wood on the fire, if everyone else is doing so we may still see domestic inflation (although, in that case the dollar would likely strengthen appreciably, blunting that effect).
Tweet
Author: Michael Ashton
Michael Ashton, CFA
E-Piphany
Michael Ashton is Managing Principal at Enduring Investments LLC, a specialty consulting and investment management boutique that offers focused inflation-market expertise. He may be contacted through that site. He is on Twitter at @inflation_guy
Prior to founding Enduring Investments, Mr. Ashton worked as a trader, strategist, and salesman during a 20-year Wall Street career that included tours of duty at Deutsche Bank, Bankers Trust, Barclays Capital, and J.P. Morgan.
Since 2003 he has played an integral role in developing the U.S. inflation derivatives markets and is widely viewed as a premier subject matter expert on inflation products and inflation trading. While at Barclays, he traded the first interbank U.S. CPI swaps. He was primarily responsible for the creation of the CPI Futures contract that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange listed in February 2004 and was the lead market maker for that contract. Mr. Ashton has written extensively about the use of inflation-indexed products for hedging real exposures, including papers and book chapters on "Inflation and Commodities," "The Real-Feel Inflation Rate," "Hedging Post-Retirement Medical Liabilities," and "Liability-Driven Investment For Individuals." He frequently speaks in front of professional and retail audiences, both large and small. He runs the Inflation-Indexed Investing Association.
For many years, Mr. Ashton has written frequent market commentary, sometimes for client distribution and more recently for wider public dissemination. Mr. Ashton received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Trinity University in 1990 and was awarded his CFA charter in 2001.
Copyright © 2010-2013 Michael Ashton
Circle Us