Disinflation, very confusingly, refers to a negative value of the second derivative of price with respect to time.
It is not a negative value for the first derivative of price, that’s deflation.
The speaker is making comparisons of quantities with different units, which is confusing, and the verb indicating transformation is inappropriate, but if you squint what they said is true:
The second derivative was going up, which heightened the salience of inflation, it’s now negative.
Without anchoring the statement with something like “while disinflation is happening, we’re still seeing modest inflation” would certainly have been clearer, I don’t think they’re quite wrong.
Our best guess at current instantaneous inflation (i.e., month over month, annualized) is just over 6% inflation. Which is above target, but is not severe. It’s 0.5% for the last month for which we have data, which (if it were precise and held constant, which it isn’t and won’t) annualizes to 6.17%.
Obviously the US is not accustomed to this rate, but there’s not a lot that breaks in the US economy with the rate where it currently stands. The money illusion makes people irritated, which has an impact on animal spirits, and Fed tightening has a more tangible effect on investment decisions.
Personally when my friends asked me “what does it mean that the US is doing all this deficit spending on pandemic subsidies?” circa 2020, I said, “it means rich people like me and my fellow software developers are likely to have our wealth diminished through inflation, but it will have positive distributive impact on the poorer folks in the economy”.
I think that’s been born out. It would be nice if we could dial inflation back instantaneously, but it does appear that we’re moving out of wage-price spiral territory, so I don’t think we have to fear years of stagflation or anything severe like that.
It is not a negative value for the first derivative of price, that’s deflation.
The speaker is making comparisons of quantities with different units, which is confusing, and the verb indicating transformation is inappropriate, but if you squint what they said is true:
The second derivative was going up, which heightened the salience of inflation, it’s now negative.
Without anchoring the statement with something like “while disinflation is happening, we’re still seeing modest inflation” would certainly have been clearer, I don’t think they’re quite wrong.