Yield for the 10-year US Treasury rose to an average 4.17% in August 2023 while core inflation year over year fell to 3.87% in August 2023.
This ends the 3-year 5-month run where core inflation exceeded the 10-year yield, something which has never happened in the data.
The only time core inflation outran the 10-year previously for a comparable period was in 1974 and 1975 when core inflation averaged 7.91% and 8.35% vs. the 10-year yield which averaged 7.56% and 7.99% respectively.
That lackadaisical response to inflation by the Federal Reserve under Arthur F. Burns (1970-1978) prefigured the 1980 resurgence of core inflation to 9.19%. Under his successor Paul Volcker, interest rates were hiked to unprecedented levels to curb inflation. The 10-year yield rose to an average of 13.92% in 1981 as a result.
The current fear is that the Powell Fed has set up the economy for a repeat of this awful period of inflation.
Whatever is said about it, there is no question that inflation is a benefit to the Federal government because it depends on borrowing to finance deficit spending and consequently the debt, now at an unprecedented $33 trillion. Inflation simply reduces that cost to the government over time by making the dollars previously borrowed worth less.
It is true that new borrowing costs much more, but the debt mountain mammoth in the living room is the more pressing problem. This is why the cognoscenti teach that inflation is a good thing.
Extending the duration of inflation at the currently relatively low level has been in the government's interest. The costs born by the public in the form of higher prices for goods, services, and borrowing are becoming routinized so that the voters are becoming inured to the deleterious effects for them while clueless of the benefits for the debt mongers.
This is particularly the case for voters who have no memory of that horrible inflation which gave rise to the backlash represented by Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and who now vastly outnumber those who still remember.
It should not be forgotten that Jimmy Carter got elected in 1976 anyway, after the Burns' inflation. The voters then took it all in stride, too, until they didn't.
Same as it ever was.
