From my armchair perspective, I am of the view that it is the slack in the labor market that has kept inflation pressures well at bay, in spite of how many years now of Federal Reserve Liquidity efforts, also known as Quantitative Easing. I have commented here many times that until that huge sum of "money" that has been created by the Fed, begins to make its way out of Wall Street and onto Main Street, inflation pressures are simply not going to build.
I think many of us who are regulars here view the current stock market rally into all-time highs, seemingly without ending, as a product of these QE programs and a ZIRP ( Zero Interest Rate Policy).
Simply put - if Yield is the name of the game, and it is, then the money flows to where the yield potential is the greatest. For the last several years now, that has been into the general equity markets and out of commodities in general.
Recently however, we have seen the Commodity indices all breaking higher, led primarily by sharply rising energy prices. We have also seen the TIPS spread hitting its highest level in 6 months. These are signs that inflation pressures are building, albeit rather slowly.
What the missing ingredient has been is rising wages. let's face it, the employment situation in this country is rotten. While some folks are indeed getting some long-sought for jobs, many of these are not high-paying. One of the few exceptions has been in the energy sector where things are on fire. There is a shortage of skilled labor there that is very real.
Today we say new home sales pick up so that is a good sign. Also, someone has to build these new homes so construction guys are staying busier than they have been for several years.
All of this is leading me to beginning focusing on another piece of economic data and that is the Average Hourly Wages numbers that we get from the government on a regular basis. For many years, employers have been in the driver's seat and have been able to choose and pick whom they want to hire and what they are willing to offer them in wages pretty much without any sort of hindrance. It has been, and to some extent, still remains an "Employer's Market".
We therefore might want to start watching more closely for any signs that this might be changing. If wages were to pick up, it should tend to see consumer spending rise and in terms of the Velocity of Money, perhaps begin to arrest that long downtrend. If that were to happen, the TIPS spread would widen out even more and the inflation genie would start pushing even harder against the cork that is presently in his bottle.
Here is a chart of the Wages data. I have taken the liberty to convert the data into PERCENTAGE CHANGES compared to the same period in the previous year. In other words, we can see what percentage wages are rising or falling from the previous year to gauge whether wages are beginning to ramp up.
Notice how wages ( again - on a percentage change basis) were falling throughout the height of the credit crisis. Layoffs, firings, hourly wage cuts, etc. all show up on the chart during that time frame. The Fed's QE programs finally seemed to kick in somewhat and arrest the downward trend but what I find really most interesting is the fact that since the decline ended in late 2009/early 2010, wages have essentially gone nowhere.
This is what I mean when I say wages are flat. It does not mean that they are not rising - it means that the rate of percentage change upward is not moving higher.
I believe this is the single most important factor in determining whether or not we see an outbreak of inflation from the Fed's monetary policies.
Remember they are bound and determined to generate inflation of at least 2%. To do so, they are going to need to see wages continuing to rise at a fast clip or at the very least, as fast as overall prices are rising in general.
When I look at the recent rate of increase in the cost of energy, and in the cost of meat for example, it does not take much in the way of math skills to realize that consumer wages are not keeping up with those.
Let's see how things shape up as we move forward. I see that there are several misguided efforts by politicians mandating higher minimum wages ( that is a self-defeating effort to buy votes anyway ) but they might just get some of that legislated into existence. I guess these economic nitwits think that business owners will just gladly surrender their profits and will not pass on higher labor costs to the general public. If we see a movement towards higher minimum wages, it just might be the catalyst to push everything higher for all of us.
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