Wednesday, March 2, 2011

We don't have inflation, we have skew

There exists a bundle of channels, which we can represent as generalized yield curves. These comprise the real economy, real goods moving in trucks on roads. Call this a channel bundle. At the equilibrium growth rate, these bundles are minimum variance relative to each other, the separation along the bundled yield curves is minimum, and relatively constant. Under this condition each channel can achieve minimum redundancy.

Today these are skewed, the bundle diverges more at the long end and is more convergent near the short end. Look at the dynamic yield curve, which is based on central government debt. Move the cursor around, It is the top end, obviously, the long end is unable to converge. That is also why macro estimates need revision, economists are measuing the top end and expecting it to extrapolate out to the periphery, the short end. They are entangled at the top end and cannot see into the restricting monetary channel.

On the ground, this likely means we are struggling with Dollar inflation in and around the Washigton DC/NYC corridor.

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