Answering the great inflation question of our time

Prices of everything; a house in Phoenix, a Ford F-150, a plane ticket to New York, have all gone up. That much is true.

Unfortunately pretty much everything else about inflation—a red hot topic these days—is conjecture. And that’s vexing, not just for the dismal scientists (aka economists), but for all of us, because whether or not prices are really rising, by how much and for how long, has massive implications in our lives. Or as Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, says: “Inflation is one of the mysteries of economic study and thought. A difficult thing to gauge and forecast and get right. That’s why the risks are high.”

The current debate over inflation really revolves around two questions: First, is this current spate of inflation, just that, a spate—or to use Wall Street’s buzzword of the moment, “transitory,”—or not? (Just to give you an idea of how buzzy, when I Google the word “transitory” the search engine suggests “inflation” after it.) And second, transitory (aka temporary) inflation or not, what does it suggest for the economy and markets?

Before I get into that, let me lay out what’s going on with prices right now. First, know that inflation,which peaked in 1980 at an annualized rate of 13.55%,has been tame for quite some time, specifically 4% or less for nearly 30 years. Which means that anyone 40 years old or younger has no experience with inflation other than maybe from an Econ 101 textbook. Obviously that could be a problem.

As an aside I remember President Ford in 1974 trying to jawbone inflation down with his "Whip Inflation Now" campaign, which featured“Win” buttons,earringsand evenugly sweaters.None of this worked and it took draconian measures by Fed Chair Paul Volcker (raising rates and targeting money supply,as described by Former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, William Poole)to eventually tame inflation and keep it under wraps for all those years.

Until now perhaps. Last week theLabor Department reported that consumer prices (the CPI, or consumer price index) rose 5% in May,the fastest annual rate in nearly 13 years—which was when the economy was overheating from the housing boom which subsequently went bust and sent the economy off a cliff and into the Great Recession. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was up 3.8%, the biggest increase since May 1992. (For the record, the likelihood of the economy tanking right now is de minimis.)