Saturday, October 22, 2011

Surely this sentence is crazy

From the latest ECB monthly bulletin comes this absurdity:

"Risks to the medium-term outlook for price developments continue to be seen as broadly balanced. On the upside, the main risks relate to the possibility of increases in indirect taxes and administrative prices, owing to the need for fi scal consolidation in the coming years. The main downside risks relate to the impact of weaker than expected growth in the euro area and globally."

Surely that is crazy!

Lets try to parse it.

Risks to the medium-term outlook for price developments continue to be seen as broadly balanced. 

Inflation is expected to be around 2 % in the medium-term.

On the upside, the main risks relate to the possibility of increases in indirect taxes and administrative prices, owing to the need for fiscal consolidation in the coming years.
But it might be higher because low NGDP growth leads to high public sector deficits, and to counter that governments will have to raise indirect taxes. 

The main downside risks relate to the impact of weaker than expected growth in the euro area and globally."
And it might be higher because the Eurozone has low NGDP growth.

So according to the ECB the reason for both high and low inflation is low NGDP growth. Surely the right policy response from the ECB is to at least lower interest rates to create higher NGDP growth. But it doesn't look like that's gonna happen. I guess that's what's really crazy!

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