Taking another look at how we measure inflation
I was interested to learn that George Osborne鈥檚 letter to Mervyn King, in reference to consumer price inflation hitting 3.7 percent in April, that housing costs should be included in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which the Bank of England uses to measure inflation. The argument is that focusing on CPI meant the Bank failed to notice the housing bubble that preceded the financial crisis, and kept interest rates inappropriately low as a result.
Well, maybe. It is true to say that had the Bank targeted an inflation measure that included housing costs, interest rates would have been higher than they otherwise were, and that perhaps Britain鈥檚 housing and asset bubbles would have been less severe. But I鈥檓 not sure it would have made that much difference. After all, the rise of India and China, and the cheaper goods and services that resulted, should have produced benign deflation 鈥� in that context, targeting a 3 percent rise in the overall price level, however defined, would still have produced significant economic distortions.
The trouble is that aggregates such as the price level conceal a lot. In reality there is actually no such thing as 鈥榯he price level鈥�, there are just millions of specific prices fluctuating against one another. And since no central bank could ever gather and process enough information to have a genuinely accurate idea of what is going on, they suffer from a classic information problem in attempting to 鈥榯arget鈥� inflation. As Hayek could have told us, this is probably insurmountable.
The solution may be to stop targeting prices, and to focus instead on controlling the money supply. Here again though, aggregates can be misleading, since the meaning of 鈥榤oney鈥� is not clear-cut amongst economists. Nevertheless, the Austrian School鈥檚 definition 鈥� which includes only cash, demand deposits with commercial banks and thrift institutions, and government deposits with banks and the central bank 鈥� both chimes with reality, and correlates very strongly other measures like with industrial production, GDP, retail sales, and prices. For more on that, see working paper by the Toby Baxendale and Anthony Evans.
Of course, even if you know what you are trying to control (and I鈥檓 suggesting the money supply, based on the Austrian definition), that doesn鈥檛 necessarily tell you how to do it. But that is a subject for another blog鈥�
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