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☆ Credibility crisis requires BoE to write new plot
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-20 | by ( Francesco Guerrera | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +7 min

LONDON, June 20 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Since May 24, thousands of British people have had their homeowning dreams dashed by a sudden spike in mortgage rates. Unlike many other central banks, the BoE doesn’t provide its own forecasts of how consumer prices will evolve in coming years. The whiplash occurred because traders had to digest the inflation shock without any interest rate guidance from policymakers. Because most banks price home loans off those derivatives, it sent mortgage rates rocketing. The BoE announces its latest interest rate decision on June 22, with traders expecting a 25-basis-point hike, to 4.75%.

Persons: “, Paul Gascoigne, BoE, Andrew Bailey, That’s, Bailey, ”, Charles Goodhart, ’, apocryphally, Seneca, David Roberts, George Hay, Oliver Taslic Organizations: Reuters, Bank of England, Monetary, U.S . Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Reuters Graphics Reuters, MPC, Financial Times, Fed, Thomson Locations: policymaking, BoE’s

☆ AI boom could expose investors’ natural stupidity
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Felix Martin | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +7 min

Indeed, enthusiasm about AI has become the one ray of light piercing the stock market gloom created by the record-breaking rise in U.S. interest rates. It’s a good moment for investors to be especially alert to the tendency of natural stupidity to drive stock market valuations to unrealistic – and therefore ultimately unprofitable – extremes. However, the most important lessons of behavioural economics relate to a more fundamental question: Will the new generation of AI do what it promises? Behavioural economics offers some cautionary tales for such attempts to apply AI in the wild. For example, stock market returns can be affected by a small number of rare but extreme movements in share prices.

EARLY WARNING SIGNSAfter years of tame inflation, Fed officials and other central bankers say they have faced a chain of disruptive events beyond their control ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Ukraine war. The central bank has made conservative estimates on inflation despite Russia cutting gas supplies to Europe in response to Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine. Even as some economists say an inflation peak could now be in sight, central bankers remain far from taming inflation. The concern among some central bankers is that politicians will respond by raising public spending and so aggravate the inflation pressure that their rate-hike cure is intended to heal. If that were to happen, central bankers “would have to reverse course to prevent the debt market from becoming more disorderly," Goodhart told Reuters.

☆ Western economies rediscover meaning of scarcity
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-27 | by ( Edward Chancellor | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +8 min

Western companies, which outsourced production to China and other emerging markets, found themselves less constrained by their domestic workforces. China’s rising exports lowered the prices of traded goods, dampening inflationary pressures and allowing Western central banks to cut interest rates to their lowest levels in history. In the 1970s, economists worried that fiscal deficits would lead to higher interest rates and lower investment. Western governments now face constraints that are common in developing countries, relating to fiscal policy, inflation and financial stability. To reduce the burden of their war debts, governments in Europe and the United States held interest rates below inflation.

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