The Investment Scientist

Yesterday, when I had a lunch meeting with the chief scientist at Fannie Mae, our conversation quickly turned to inflation.

My view of that is more pessimistic than the Fed and most mainline economists. Somehow, these economists seem to have forgotten a basic economic tenet – the rational expectation theory. This theory, to put it in layman’s terms, basically says that on aggregate, what people expect to happen will happen. That’s why Fed officials have long been extremely careful about what they say that could change people’s expectations. 

Today’s Fed under Jerome Powell has been much less careful. Here are the three acts of the current Fed that have crushed the expectation that inflation will stay low and stable.