The Deflation Calamity Howlers Are Dead Wrong—-In Europe And Everywhere Else

The calamity howlers of deflation are out in force this morning owing to an absolute economic non sequitur. Namely, that year-on-year consumer prices in the EU came in at negative 0.2% in December, implying that ECB printing presses need to go into immediate overdrive.

Well, of course the CPI has momentarily weakened. Crude oil has experienced a monumental plunge of more than 50% since mid-2014. That has temporarily dragged down the euro zone’s reported CPI and the math isn’t all that complex. During the last 12 months,  euro zone energy prices have fallen by 6.3%, and everything else is still 0.6% higher than a year ago.

So what’s the emergency? This is the very same CPI blip that occurred when oil collapsed in the second half of 2008. As is evident below, that episode did not generate some cascading plunge into economic darkness. In fact, the Eurozone CPI was back running above 2.5% in no time.

The truth of the matter is that the EU-19 is in clover because it’s consumers get a big break; and, on the other side of the economic equation, it produces almost no oil. Europe’s production is mainly in the UK and Norway and they have their own currencies. Accordingly, the ECB should be putting its printing presses on an extended sabbatical and declaring victory on the achievement of its “price stability” objective.

Indeed, the notion that the hairline puncture of the zero inflation line shown above is a precursor of a deflationary calamity amounts to economic voodoo. There has been no structural change whatsoever in the Eurozone economy since 2008 when the last oil-driven CPI drop occurred, and therefore no empirical basis for the notion that wages and prices are about to descend into an accelerating downward spiral. If anything Brussels’s dirigisme regime has made prices and wages even more “rigid” and “sticky” owing to it’s avalanche of new regulations, subsidies and other economic interventions.

The plain fact is that the euro zone like the rest of the DM has an inflationary bias that is embedded in six decades of history during which the euro and its predecessor currencies lost purchasing power month-in-and-month-out. So households are finally getting what will undoubtedly be a short respite from the inflation tax, but that is the extent of it. There is not one rational reason to believe that the relentless upward march of the price level shown below will not presently resume its well-worn path.