I see Jon Hilsenrath at the Wall Street Journal seconds my take from this morning:
Federal Reserve officials are on track to start raising short-term interest rates later this year, even though long-term rates are going in the other direction amid new investor worries about weak global growth, falling oil prices and slowing consumer price inflation.
This is generally consistent with my view. The Fed is likely reacting more slowly than market participants. Hilsenrath adds something I forgot to mention:
Central to their internal deliberations ahead of the March meeting is a debate about how low the jobless rate can fall before it stirs wage and inflation pressure. Fed officials estimate the “natural rate” of unemployment—meaning the rate below which wage pressures increase—is between 5.2% and 5.5%.
Mr. Rosengren said he was considering revising this estimate down because the jobless rate has fallen to near the 5.2%-5.5% range without triggering any sign of wage pressure. He said he suspected some of his Fed colleagues also were considering moving this estimate down. The lower the estimate goes, the more patient they might be before raising rates.
Just as I think it will be hard for the Fed to raise rates if the unemployment rate continues to fall while wage growth remains subdued, it will also be difficult to justify current estimates of the natural rate of unemployment under those circumstances. Still, I would caution that lowering the estimate of the natural rate would be, I think, an implicit rejection of the "underemployment hypothesis." It would be easier to adjust estimates of the natural rate downward if measures of underemployment were more consistent with their traditional relationships with unemployment. In other words, the natural rate may be consistent with subdued wage growth due to the existence of high levels of underemployment.
My opinion is that the global disinflationary environment would support low inflation at levels of unemployment below the Fed's current estimate of the natural rate, similar to the situation of the late 1990s.
