Fed Watch: Should The Fed Tolerate 5% Unemployment?

Tim Duy:

Should The Fed Tolerate 5% Unemployment?. by Tim Duy: In recent posts I highlighted the stagnant unemployment rate. I believe the Fed is on thin ice by raising rates when unemployment is moving sideways, especially when there exists evidence of substantial underemployment (see also this FEDS note). But there is also evidence of growing wage pressures, in particular the Atlanta Fed wage measure:

Would wage growth continue to accelerate if unemployment persisted at current levels? If so, would this mean the Fed had reached a tolerable equilibrium? My answers are "possibly" to the former question, and "probably not" to the latter.

Another way to consider the data is via a wage Phillips curve:

I suspect the black dots around 4 percent unemployment are effectively incompatible with a 2 percent inflation target given current productivity growth. The economy is currently operating at the light blue dot. My expectation is that when when conditions are sufficiently tight to raise wage growth to the 4 percent range, they will also be sufficiently tight to raise inflation to the Fed's target. It is possible that this occurs near 5 percent unemployment - essentially a vertical move from the current position.

But while this might be possible (wage growth might just stall out at current levels of unemployment), I hesitate to say that it was optimal. Points up and to the left - lower unemployment but the same wage growth are likely consistent with the Fed's inflation target and thus obviously preferable as they entail higher levels of employment.

Getting to such points, however, includes a higher possibility of overshooting the inflation target (although I would suggest that the magnitude of the overshooting would be no more excessive than the magnitude of undershooting the Fed is currently willing to tolerate). So, and this is reiterating a point from yesterday, I would say that if the Fed slows activity now, they risk settling the economy into a suboptimal outcome with lower employment and, maybe, lower inflation than their mandate. This would seem to be the policy approach of a central bank hell-bent on approaching the inflation target from below. By avoiding further rate hikes until it is clear that activity is in fact sufficient to induce further declines in the unemployment rate, the Fed will maximize its odds of meeting its mandates, but at the cost of some risk of overshooting its inflation target.

It seems to me then that a central bank with a symmetric inflation target would choose to refrain from further rate hikes when progress toward full employment had clearly decelerated:

(or even stalled):

and inflation remains below target:

We will soon see if the Fed agrees.