Inflation Problem Remains Unlicked

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From the Wall Street Journal:

After being given up for dead, inflation is gradually coming back to life.

It’s not roaring back. Indeed, it’s still below the 2% level the Federal Reserve targets, one reason the Fed is almost certain to leave interest rates unchanged when it meets this week.

….The behavior of inflation-protected bonds suggests that in early July, investors expected U.S. inflation to average 1.4% over the coming decade. As of Friday, that had risen to 1.7%. That is still below the Fed’s 2% target, evidence that investors remain unconvinced the Fed has licked the low-inflation problem.

The “low-inflation” problem! That’s totally accurate, but did you imagine you’d ever see the Wall Street Journal discussing the problem of inflation being too damn low? For those of us of a certain age, it feels like an alternate universe.

Anyway, the primary inflation measure used by the Fed is the trimmed mean PCE rate. Here it is. It’s been going up steadily but very slowly for the past few years, but it’s still pretty low and there’s not even a hint of acceleration yet.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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