저자: PeterSchiff · 외국인
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제롬 파월 연준 의장이 잭슨홀 심포지엄 연설에서 2% 인플레이션 목표를 '연간 2%'에서 '장기 평균 2%'로 사실상 바꿨다고 주장하는 영상이다. 핵심 주장: 과거 몇 년간 물가상승률이 2% 미만이었기 때문에, 평균 2%를 맞추려면 앞으로 2%를 넘는 인플레이션이 필요하다는 논리다. 이는 목표를 사실상 상향하는 것이라고 본다. 목표의 역사: 원래 연준의 '물가안정'은 물가가 떨어지지 않는 것이었고, 2%는 처음에 상한(ceiling)으로 도입됐다가 이후 목표(target)로 바뀌었다. 디플레이션 완충 장치라는 설명도 근거가 약하다고 비판한다. 과거 물가가 내려간 적이 없는데 미래 물가를 더 올릴 이유가 없고, 소비자 생활비 상승에 추가 고통을 주는 정책이라는 주장이다. 투자 관련 직접적인 가격 방향 예측이나 특정 종목 언급은 거의 없고, 연준의 통화정책 철학에 대한 비판이 중심이다. 출연자는 연준 정책 비판 입장을 견지한다. 리스크·조건: 해당 연설 시점(2020년 9월)의 정책 전환 해석에 기반하며, 이후 실제 물가·금리 경로는 영상에 포함되지 않는다.
다듬은 글
the big news of the week is that jerome powell in his virtual jackson hall symposium speech finally made it official the fed's infamous 2 inflation target is now not really a hard number but an average meaning that each year is looked at in relation to the years that preceded it so prior to this change of a mandate the fed was claiming that each year its target was to have a two percent rate of inflation now the target is that over the course of time inflation is supposed to average two percent and the reason the fed is able to say this is because based on the measures that the fed uses to calculate inflation or at least the change in consumer prices over the last many many years the rate has been below two percent so based on the fed's new uh target of an average rate of two percent future inflation rates need to be above two percent and of course the fed talks to a symmetrical uh amount above or obviously to create an average you'd have to have some symmetry but to the extent that we had several years of one and a half percent inflation that would require several years of two and a half percent inflation in order to create a two percent average but what the fed has effectively done and nobody is really talking about this is it really raised its inflation target except we don't actually know what that target is so it's kind of a moving target but if we've had all of these years of below two percent inflation and again i'm using the word inflation the way the fed uses it not what it actually means so i'm not referring to the expansion of the money supply but the increase in consumer prices that results from that expansion that inflation but given that the official cpi has been below 2 for all of these years the only way to bring the average up to two percent is for the fed to now target an inflation rate above two percent so that's really what the fed has done it's not that they just said we want inflation to average two percent what they're saying is that they want future inflation to be higher than two percent so that we can average out all this low inflation that we've had in the past now of course the media did cover this at least the financial media but not from the angle that it should i mean it's amazing or maybe not amazing because nothing really amazes me anymore when it comes to the lack of understanding or just outright financial ignorance on the part of the mainstream financial media but the story is actually a lot bigger and a lot more significant and you know it actually should reveal to people that there's a much larger problem in the economy than people are willing to acknowledge now first of all nobody is really talking about why we need to make up for lower inflation in the past i mean if we had inflation that was only one percent last year why would we need three percent inflation this year i mean it doesn't even make sense i mean if you go back to the bs reason for the two percent target and again even before i get to that i want to talk about the evolution of this so-called target because it wasn't always there and i've mentioned this in the past and podcast but it's a good time to bring it up again especially since i do have a lot of new listeners uh who don't necessarily remember or didn't hear the earlier podcast but once upon a time there was no official target at all the fed just was supposed to have price stability and what does price stability mean well it's pretty simple it means that prices are stable now how do you define stable well not moving the same right stable prices don't go up and they don't go down now before they had a mission of price stability the natural tendency of prices is to fall you know that's what happened for the hundred year time period from 1800 to 1900 we had a steady decline in prices interrupted occasionally by inflationary periods like the uh civil war where there was uh money printed for the first time that the greenbacks but in general we had steadily declining prices for that entire century and so the goal of the federal reserve which didn't come in until 1913 if its goal was price stability the fed was supposed to prevent prices from going down and instead to keep them stable now i would argue that there's no reason for that that falling prices represent a benefit to the economy uh they represent a benefit to consumers they represent a benefit to businesses which can have do better volume uh when prices are lower because their customers can afford to buy more stuff so i think that there are incredible benefits to a declining cost of living i think everybody ends up benefiting with a rising standard of living but the initial mistake of the fed was to believe that uh declining prices were problematic and so instead of having prices that slowly declined over time the goal of the fed would be to have stable prices where they remain the same over time well it didn't take long and i'm not sure how long but eventually the definition of price stability became inflation of less than two percent and so that two percent number was initially introduced by the fed as being a ceiling right meaning that the fed would make sure that inflation was less than two percent not two percent as a target but two percent as a ceiling so any inflation rate below two percent was considered stable prices but of course the lower the better when the fed initially uh talked about a two percent ceiling if inflation was one percent during the year they wouldn't think that was problematic they would think that was great because they were a whole percentage point below the ceiling and in fact the closer they got to zero the better they performed their job because stable prices would be zero increases so to the extent that you have a small increase then you're not quite as stable but they said as long as that increase is below two percent we'll count it as being stable but if it got above two percent then we would have to do something to get the number back below two percent so it started off as a ceiling eventually the ceiling became a target this is how the policy evolved eventually the federal reserve began saying that two percent wasn't the ceiling it was actually a target that they needed to hit two percent and so instead of being happy with one percent inflation because it was less than the two percent ceiling now it was a problem because they needed to get it up to two percent and it was only one percent but it never really made sense that the fed would target two percent inflation because there was no logical reason why two percent inflation was better than one percent inflation but here is the reason that the fed came up with and of course it's all bs they just had to rationalize uh you know wanting more inflation even though it's not a good thing but the way the fed explained it was that they needed a buffer because the worst thing that could happen to the economy according to the fed was that consumer prices went down right if we had deflation the way they defined it uh and that if consumer prices went down that it would be so bad that the fed needs to make sure there's at least enough of a cushion right distance between the zero bound and the inflation rate just in case we you know accidentally fell below that bound so the fed said that we need to make sure that inflation is at least two percent to make sure that it's not negative because if we're shooting for two percent and we end up with one percent or a half a percent well it's okay we just have to make sure we have a big enough cushion to guard against the possibility of us ever getting a negative number so you know we were going to deal with a little higher inflation just as an insurance against falling prices which of course was all bs but that was their explanation but of course that doesn't explain why now the fed says that we need to have an average rate of 2 because by definition if in prior years the inflation rate was positive whether it was positive a half a percent or one percent or one and a half percent it means that in every year that inflation was above zero we dodged that bullet of falling prices so we didn't have falling prices in the past so how does having an inflation rate above two percent now do anything i mean we there's no reason for that and we don't need an even bigger cushion now to make sure that we don't have falling prices we never had falling prices before why should we have them again it doesn't make any sense to say because we didn't have enough inflation in the past that we need to have even more inflation in the future because every year that we have inflation the cost of living goes up if the goal of the fed is to just make sure that the cost of living doesn't go down they already succeeded they already achieved that goal why do they have to inflict additional pain on the population by saying you know what your cost of living didn't go up quite as much as it could have in years of past so now we've got to make sure that we average out to two percent so because your cost of living only went up by one percent for the last few years now we have to make sure it goes up by three percent over the next few years so that you catch up none of that makes any sense especially if you remember the original justification for moving the two percent ceiling to a target that justification doesn't make any sense now in moving the annual target to an annual average that effectively raises the target in the future
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