Inflation has probably peaked in Australia – yes, it was a transient episode

Given yesterday’s extensive National Accounts analysis replaced my usual Wednesday blog post, I am using today to discuss a range of issues and provide a musical interlude into your lives for peace. Yesterday’s bad National Accounts data release took the headlines away from another data release from the ABS yesterday – the monthly CPI data results. Inflation is falling in Australia and has probably peaked. The RBA still thinks it is going to hike rates a few more times. As more data comes out, their cover (justifications) are evaporating by the day and it is becoming obvious that they are pushing rates up because they want to reclaim the territory as the ‘boss’ of macroeconomic policy irrespective of the costs and hardships they impose on lower-income Australian families. Shocking really. I also look at the new RadioMMT show which launched last week. And the debate about Covid continues but the evidence is being distorted badly by those who continue to claim it was all a conspiracy to bring us to heel. And then some music.

Inflation in decline

Yesterday’s data release in Australia was dominated by the National Accounts for the December-quarter 2022, which showed that Australia is sliding towards recession as the RBA rate hikes kill off household consumption expenditure.

The latter is really only remaining in positive territory because the saving ratio is falling dramatically.

The RBA rate hikes are not only reducing disposable income for low-income families but destroying what little wealth holdings they have.

It is one of the largest redistributions of national income to profits and the wealthy that we have seen in a long while.

And for what?

Well, the justification is that the RBA has to repress excessive wage pressure.

Except, yesterday’s National Accounts showed that the wage share in national income, which also is a measure of real unit labour costs has not changed over the last 6 months of 2022.

What has changed is the profit share which has increased significantly as corporations with market power (supermarkets, banks, etc) push up prices well beyond any shift in unit costs.

So we can conclude quite confidently that there is no wage pressure pushing up prices.

The inflationary pressures are supply-side driven and the profiteers in the corporate sector have taken advantage of that cover to push margins up and record record profits.

So why does the RBA think that interest rate rises will solve that problem?

And why does the RBA in its insipid public statements try to claim it is a wage problem but never mention the market abuse by corporations?

Well you can answer those questions by now.

Yesterday (March 1, 2023), the ABS also published its latest – Monthly Consumer Price Indicator – which covers January 2023.

Remember, this is a new series from the ABS as it tries to produce more immediate price level data in between the quarterly CPI releases.

There are limitations with the monthly CPI indicator – it only covers about 60 per cent of the items that appear in the more detailed quarterly release.

But, despite that, it does give us some recent inkling about where the inflation rate is heading.

And the answer is down!

1. In December 2022, the annual rate recorded was 8.4 per cent.

2. In January 2023, the annual rate has fallen to 7.4 per cent.

3. In the month, Food price inflation has fallen from 9.5 per cent to 8.2 per cent, Clothing and footware from 6.3 to 3.1 per cent, Housing from 10.1 to 9.8 per cent, Transport from 7.3 to 6.3 per cent, Recreation and culture from 14.4 to 10.2 per cent.

4. In January 2023, the month-to-month inflation rate was -0.1 points having been 0.94 per cent in December 2022.

In other words, the inflation rate is declining quite quickly as the supply factors ease.

The following graph shows the latest annual and monthly inflation rates for the All Items series.

Inflation was starting to moderate in mid-2022, before any rate hike impact had been felt.

It accelerated a little towards the end of 2022 after severe flooding pushed food prices up significantly and people started paying ridiculously high airfares for travel as the airlines gouged profits.

I suspect it has peaked now and will decline relatively quickly.

The Bank of Japan officials understood that this inflationary period was transitory and would sort itself out in time.

That is why they chose to hold the line on monetary policy and not inflict any additional pain on households through interest rate hikes.

Instead, the Japanese government reduced the pain through various fiscal measures designed to ease households through the cost-of-living squeeze.

In other countries, including Australia, the neoliberals were out in force trying to reassert their primacy in the economic policy hierarchy and couldn’t wait to push up rates and inflict pain on mortgage holders.

But inflation was already showing signs of retreat as they did this.

It was an unnecessary exercise from that perspective.

It is time we took back control of economic policy and made it accountable to the voters.

RadioMMT is now on-air at 3CR Melbourne

I mentioned a few weeks ago that – MMTed – was helping Anne and Kevin with a new radio program at 3CR Melbourne (a community radio program).

RadioMMT – is hosted by Anne Maxwell and Kevin Gaynor and is presented on 3CR Radical Radio on Friday’s from 17:30 to 18:30.

Their promo title is ‘Economics for the rest of us!’.

I am really pleased to help them in this venture.

Their first show was launched last week and was a great success.

Their first podcast is out now – #001 Bill Mitchell: Speaking Economic Truth About Power.

This little audio gram sets the scene:

As part of the show, I am doing a fortnightly podcast – which will run for around 5-6 minutes and considers issues as they arise from an MMT perspective.

I will make that available via the MMTed – Home Page as well as through RadioMMT’s portal. I will announce the launch of that segment soon.

Is Australia Post about post or what?

There is a debate going on in Australia about the changes in the postal service and the decline in letter deliveries.

Australia Post is owned by the federal government on behalf of all of us.

There have been constant pressure to privatise it in the past but it would be political suicide I think given the place of our postal service in our culture – in a land where distances are great and isolation can be moderated by letters etc.

It is clear that E-mail and similar have reduced our frequency of letter writing.

I thought about that yesterday when I went to get my Covid booster shot and the clinic said ‘right or left arm’.

They use to place injections in the non-writing arm when we were writers.

Now we are typists, it doesn’t really matter which arm you get the injection – you just get a sore arm.

But the volume of letters being delivered in Australia is declining quite sharply and there is a debate about how will the federal government “save Australia Post” (Source).

Suggestions include abandoning letter deliveries.

Excuse me.

Isn’t Australia Post a postal service?

Letters are post n’est-ce pas?

While this might seem trivial, it is a classic case of what is wrong with the reasoning applied to public services.

What does ‘save’ Australia Post mean – given that the postal service is a public body?

Well apparently, Australia Post has reported that its ‘letter division’ has made a loss “for the first time since 2015”.

So what you might ask?

And you would be correct in concluding so what!

Today, the Government is going to release a paper outlining how it plans to reduce those losses – by cutting letter deliveries and pushing up the price of postage stamps.

The claim is that postal rates are low relative to other countries.

As an aside, when I came back from Japan at the end of last year, I posted some things back and couldn’t believe how low the charges were from Japan Post.

Australian postal charges are much higher.

The Government’s discussion paper (I cannot link to it yet) is obsessed about Australia Post generating enough revenue to make profits.

And the review going on now will get plenty of submissions demanding the service be privatised.

The principle is this – a public enterprise that is charted under law to “reasonably meet the social, industrial and commercial needs of the Australian community” does not have to make commercial profits.

It is a public service and while it should be run with minimal resource waste, it is flawed reasoning to assess its performance using the same metrics and framework that one would assess a commercial, private-for-profit corporation.

The federal government is the currency issuer and can meet any shortfalls in Australia Post accounts.

If the concern is that the ‘costs’ of production then rather than look to fundamentally alter the character of this institution and turn it into a courier service in competition with the myriad of the same in the private sector, the government should look at the ridiculously high management fees they pay the bosses at Australia Post.

The salaries and bonuses paid are obscene.

Further, there is an equity issue here.

I can do without letter deliveries.

I no longer receive long, hand-written epistles from friends every three months or so from the far corners of the Earth.

I get typed E-mails on a daily basis.

But there is still a cohort in our population who for various reasons, often age or income, who have not yet made it into the digital world and rely on letters being delivered to maintain their connectivity with society.

Getting rid of letter deliveries will punish those people, who are often in low-income cohorts.

Reading the science on Covid

I am a mask wearer – whenever I am in public settings.

I even wear a mask to watch the football in an open air stadium.

I purchased a ‘flo mask’ from the US, which offers very high protection.

I am not talking here about paper or cloth masks that are below N95/P2 standards.

I believe, on the balance of probabilities, that an N95 or higher mask protects me from acquiring a respitrary illnesses, including Covid.

There is a mass of credible scientific research that I have read over the last three years which provides the science to that ‘belief’.

I am very well trained in research design and would say I am an expert in mathematical statistics and econometrics, which means I understand research results and can understand limitations in the design of projects.

So when I read scientific literature I don’t just take the headline result but dig into the methodology etc to fully understand the qualifications etc.

I have concluded that the overwhelming body of research supports the notion that mask wearing is an effective way to reduce risk of infection.

You can see a sample of this research here – Science Brief: Community Use of Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2

Recently, a report published by the Cochrane Library about mask effectiveness, which I won’t link to, has sent the ‘cookers’ out crazy telling us that they told us so – wearing a mask is a waste of time in terms of reducing the likelihood of being infected by Covid or any other respiratory disease.

If you read that report and understand methodology and statistics, then you would not come to that conclusion.

Fortunately, a public health expert at Columbia University has forensically analysed that research and summarised it for us.

The UK Guardian article (February 27, 2023) – Don’t believe those who claim science proves masks don’t work – will help you see how reported results than non-experts will interpret as concluding that masks don’t work are not valid and do not overturn the vast body of work that is credible and shows the opposite.

It is worth reading.

You will learn that the Cochrane meta-study examined 78 papers but only 2 of them were about Covid and masks.

And if you read the 2 research papers that were about Covid and mask wearing you will find they found that “masks did protect wearers from Covid-19″.

The other papers are about influenza which is much “less contagious than Covid-19”, so it is no surprise that mask wearing was found to be less important.

If you read Twitter and the rantings of the Great Barrington lot about this paper you won’t find reference in their work to the qualification provided in the Cochrane paper by the authors:

The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions.

That is tech-speak for ‘grain of salt’.

I will leave it to you to read the UK Guardian article further because it draws some interesting parallels with the way the tobacco lobby has worked over the years to convince us that smoking is not harmful.

The data doesn’t lie.

Covid is slowly wiping out the aged care population because we have abandoned precautions under pressure from the ‘cookers’.

The next variant, might just turn its attention on the rest of us.

Music – Kyoto Jazz Sextet

This is what I have been listening to while working this morning.

When I was working in Kyoto last year I heard about a Jazz band – the ‘Kyoto Jazz Sextet’ – which is a sub-project of the – Kyoto Jazz Massive.

The latter is a partnership of two brothers who are DJs and remixers in Kyoto.

After working together for 20 years, they assembled a full performing sextet which released an album – Unity – in 2015.

This song – Extra Freedom – is off that album.

When I return to Kyoto for several months later this year I hope to catch up with this band.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2023 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.