JPM Comes Out Against Bernanke’s Helicopter: “Raising Inflation Expectations Is A Bad Idea”

Tuesday, December 3, 2013
By Paul Martin

by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
12/03/2013

As we explained over two months ago, and as the Fed is no doubt contemplating currently, the primary topic on the agenda of central bankers everywhere and certainly in the Marriner Eccles building, is how to boost inflation expectations as much as possible, preferably without doing a thing and merely jawboning “forward expectations” (or more explicitly through the much discussed nominal GDP targeting) in order to slowly but surely or very rapidly and even more surely, get to the core problem facing the developed world: an untenable mountain of debt, and specifically, inflating it away. Of course, higher rates without a concurrent pick up in economic activity means a stock market tumble, both in developed and emerging countries, as the Taper experiment over the summer showed so vividly, which in turn would crush what many agree is the Fed’s only achievement over the past 5 years – creating and nurturing the “wealth effect” resulting from record high asset prices, which provides lubrication for financial conditions and permits the proper functioning of capital markets. Perhaps this is the main concern voiced by JPM’s chief US economist Michael Feroli who today has issued an interesting piece titled simply enough: “Raising inflation expectations: a bad idea.” Is this the first shot across the bow of a Fed which may announce its first taper as soon as two weeks from today, in order to gradually start pushing inflation expectations higher?

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