Is Inflation Ever Going to Go Down?
If inflation surges, how long on average, will it take to subside to a reasonable target rate of 2%?
The Determinants of Inflation
The findings from this Hidden Markov Model analysis provide policymakers with valuable insights into the nature and behavior of inflation regimes. This information can inform the design and implementation of monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies to effectively manage inflation, stabilize the economy, and promote sustainable economic growth.
Gold as a Safe-Haven Asset
I’ve received calls from clients inquiring about moving assets to gold. When I asked them why, three reasons dominated.
Comparing past and present inflation rates can be tricky
The objective of this article is to build better estimates of CPI headline and core inflation values so inflation comparisons over time are more reliable. The run-up in inflation we are currently experiencing is difficult to contextualize because it is inconsistent with past practices, weights on expenditures have changed, and the treatment of housing costs.
Investing in Deflation, Inflation, and Stagflation Regimes
In this article, we examine the research on investing during inflationary regimes such as deflation, inflation, and stagflation. Factors perform relatively well in all regimes on a real basis.
Can We Measure Inflation with Twitter
Drawing on Italian tweets, we employ textual data and machine learning techniques to build new real-time measures of consumers’ inflation expectations. First, we select keywords to identify tweets related to prices and expectations thereof. Second, we build a set of daily measures of inflation expectations around the selected tweets, combining the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with a dictionary-based approach, using manually labeled bi-grams and tri-grams. Finally, we show that Twitter-based indicators are highly correlated with both monthly survey-based and daily market-based inflation expectations. Our new indicators anticipate consumers’ expectations, proving to be a good real-time proxy, and provide additional information beyond market-based expectations, professional forecasts, and realized inflation. The results suggest that Twitter can be a new timely source for eliciting beliefs.
Bond Investing in Inflationary Times
As the chief research officer of Buckingham Strategic Partners, the issue I am being asked to address most often is about fixed income strategies when yields are at historically low levels and inflation risk is heightened due to the unprecedented increase in money creation (through quantitative easing), the extraordinary expansionary fiscal spending around the globe, and the war in Ukraine driving prices higher (especially for food and energy). As always, to answer the question we turn first to the academic evidence on which investments in general provide the best hedges against inflation.