| Wage growth is not driving inflation. Pushing unemployment higher isn't the route to fix inflation. Recent inflation was driven primarily by two things significant increase in energy costs. Just like in the the 70s large oil spikes will drive large inflation as the cost of everything requires energy. Second was sever supply constraints due to lack of labor due to Covid (either people out side, plants running minimally, or older people retiring, or deaths). Labor force participation rates dropped 2% world wide 3% in the use. Overall labor force participation has been slowly decreasing over time (due to countries moving up the development index), but that was roughly a decade worth of gradual reduction that just dropped overnight due to Covid. Supply became severly constrained for the same number of people. Increasing unemployment will only make the situation worse. Look at world labor force participation rate [1], it still hasn't recovered raising unemployment will only make it worse. Or look at US which dropped almost 3%. What needs to happen is that needs to recover. It started recovering slightly but still not back to the level it needs to be. That's what will fix inflation, increasing production of goods and services, not restricting them more. What will increase labor force participation? Increasing wages. For almost-retirees, those with deciding whether to work or not wages aren't sufficient to incent them to do so. Raising wages would bring people back into the labor force (without causing inflation in real terms). Capital is taking such a large portion of the gains of productivity in high productivity countries that wages aren't drawing in people to work. Increase the wages and that will fix itself. That started to happen and the economy started rebalancing, and then govts began stepping in to halt it. As a result the are pushing us towards lower production with supply shortages (more or less stagflation). 1. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS
2. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab... |
https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker [ click the "wage level" button ]
And there has been a historically low number of job seekers per job opening:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/job-openings-and-labor-turnover/u...
And the US unemployment rate has been running at historically low levels of 3.5-3.7%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
I guarantee you that the top graph there of how wage growth is running is what is most concerning the Fed when they talk about inflation.
We had commodities inflation during the last oil spike around 2010-2014 and the Fed didn't care about that. They know that commodities inflation acts as a tax and a natural brake on the economy and is cyclical in nature, so they didn't act. It didn't show up in wage growth.
We have both acting together right now, but it is the wage growth portion that the Fed is reacting to.
And here's a good short reaction article to Jerome Powell's comments earlier this month:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/jerome-powell-needs-...
Particularly focus on:
> “We’ve made less progress than expected on inflation,” Powell said.
compared to:
> The Labor Department’s consumer price index shows that, on average, prices have risen just 0.2 percent during the last five months — a stark turnaround from the high of 1.3 percent in June
The Fed is not as trivially stupid as the portrayal of the person who can't get past the y-o-y inflation headlines. They understand that CPI inflation is down. Oil and gas prices are back down. Why are they still yapping about less progress than expected keeping inflation under control? They're not pants-on-head stupid. Their definition of inflation encompasses wage growth (and I'd argue that in fact that is the definition of inflation that they are MOST concerned about) and isn't any of the CPI numbers.
And you can read this concern directly from Powell's remarks:
> Despite the slowdown in growth, the labor market remains extremely tight, with the unemployment rate near a 50-year low, job vacancies still very high, and wage growth elevated. Job gains have been robust, with employment rising by an average of 272,000 jobs per month over the last three months. Although job vacancies have moved below their highs and the pace of job gains has slowed from earlier in the year, the labor market continues to be out of balance, with demand substantially exceeding the supply of available workers. The labor force participation rate is little changed since the beginning of the year > [...] > The third piece, which is something like 55 percent of the index, PCE core inflation index, is non-housing-related core services. And that’s really a function of the labor market, largely. The biggest cost, by far, in that sector is labor. And we do see a very, very strong labor market, one where we haven’t seen much softening, where job growth is very high, where wages are very high. Vacancies are quite elevated, and, really, there’s an imbalance in the labor market between supply and demand. So that part of it, which is the biggest part, is likely to take a substantial period to get down. > The other—you know, the goods inflation has turned pretty quickly now after not turning at all for a year and a half. Now it seems to be turning. But there’s an expectation, really, that the services inflation will not move down so quickly, so that we’ll have to stay at it, so that we may have to raise rates higher to get to where we want to go. And that’s really why we are writing down those high rates and why we’re expecting that they’ll have to remain high for a time.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon...