Why Inflation Around the World Just Won’t Go Away

FRANKFURT—The world’s central banks underestimated inflation last year. They are trying not to make the same mistake twice.

Across affluent countries, central bankers are sharply lifting inflation forecasts, penciling in further interest-rate increases and warning investors that interest rates will stay high for some time. Some have set aside plans to keep interest rates on hold.

Roughly a year into their campaign against high inflation, policy makers are some way from being able to declare victory. In the U.S. and Europe, underlying inflation is still around 5% or higher even as last year’s heady increases in energy and food prices fade from view. On both sides of the Atlantic, wage growth has stabilised at high levels and shows few signs of steady declines.

Indeed, the impact of the past year’s aggressive interest-rate increases seems to be ebbing in places, with signs that housing markets are stabilising and unemployment is resuming its decline. Growth softened in the eurozone, which has entered a technical recession, but the economic bloc still added nearly a million new jobs in the first three months of the year, while the U.S. economy has recently added some 300,000 jobs a month. Canada, Sweden, Japan and the U.K skirted recessions after growth unexpectedly rebounded. Business surveys suggest a relatively buoyant outlook.

All that puts major central banks in a tricky spot. They need to decide if inflation has stalled way above their 2% target, which could require much higher interest rates to fix, or if inflation’s decline is only delayed.

Get the call wrong, and they could push the rich world into a deep recession or force it to endure years of high inflation.

“It’s not an enviable situation that central banks are in,” said Stefan Gerlach, a former deputy governor of Ireland’s central bank. “You could make a major mistake either way.”

The difficulty is compounded by central banks having missed the rise of inflation in the first place, he said. These so-called policy errors hurt the standing of officials and might lead them to second-guess their decisions, as both sides of the inflation debate battle over why economists have been so wrong-footed on inflation.

The Federal Reserve last week held interest rates steady but signalled two more increases this year, which would lift U.S. rates to a 22-year high. Price inflation in core services excluding housing, a closely watched gauge of underlying price pressures, “remains elevated and has not shown signs of easing,” the Fed wrote in its semiannual monetary policy report last week.

Central banks in Australia and Canada recently surprised investors with interest-rate increases, the latter after a months-long pause. The European Central Bank last week increased interest rates by a quarter percentage point and indicated it would continue to push them higher at least through the summer. “We are not thinking about pausing,” ECB President Christine Lagarde said.

The Bank of England showed a readiness to pause its long series of interest rate rises since the start of the year, but it is now expected to raise its key interest rate for a 13th consecutive time this week as wage and consumer-price growth prove sticky. Investors anticipate five further rate increases that would take the bank’s key rate to 5.75%.

“We’ve still been going up, the ECB is still going up, everybody’s still going up, and the U.S. economy is still ripping along for the most part,” Fed Governor Christopher Waller said on Friday in a moderated discussion in Oslo.

British lawmakers have been running low on patience. The committee of lawmakers responsible for scrutinising the central bank Tuesday called for an independent review of its inflation forecasts, with a view to finding out what went wrong.

With economic signals mixed, central banks are entering a new phase: They need to wait long enough for past rate rises to filter through the economy without underestimating inflation again.

There are good reasons to wait. For one thing, the savings accumulated by households and businesses during the pandemic might have supported spending and countered the impact of rising borrowing costs. Businesses are highly profitable, which has enabled them to retain workers in a tough economy. As savings are depleted, spending will fall and inflation might resume its decline.

Interest-rate increases might also only just be starting to bite. Businesses and households might not respond when borrowing costs increase from zero to 1%, but they might cut spending more when rates rise to 5%. “It might be highly nonlinear,” said Gerlach.

Crucially, economies are still recovering from the pandemic. The delayed reopening of China’s economy supported growth around the world and might get a boost with fresh stimulus measures.

Many close-contact services such as restaurants and retail still have room to rebound following their huge plunge during the period of lockdowns and social distancing, according to Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank. In the U.K., output of consumer-facing services is still 8.7% short of its prepandemic level, while the output of all other sectors is 1.7% higher.

Stronger spending on consumer-facing services will damp the impact of interest-rate rises for a time. But those effects won’t last long if economic growth continues to soften, which should reduce incomes and spending.

“The main point now is the transmission of our past monetary decisions, which are strongly reflected in financial conditions, but whose economic effects could take up to two years to be fully felt,” said François Villeroy de Galhau, who sits on the ECB’s rate-setting committee as Bank of France governor, on Friday.

Other considerations, however, suggest that inflation could remain sticky.

Some Fed officials believe that interest rates are hitting the economy more quickly than in the past, meaning that previous increases may already have worked through the system—and even more are needed.

Why might that be? Central bankers now state clearly what they are doing and what they intend to do in future, enabling investors to react immediately, Waller argued on Friday. In rate-hiking cycles as recently as the 1990s, the Fed didn’t even inform investors of its latest policy decisions. As a result, the yield on 2-year U.S. Treasury notes had increased by 200 basis points in March 2022, before the Fed increased rates at all, Waller said.

Moreover, new central-bank policies might damp the impact of interest-rate increases. Bundesbank economists argued in a recent paper that as rates rise, banks are earning more on their large stock of excess reserves parked with central banks, which reflect central banks’ large-scale asset-purchase programs. That helps banks to continue to extend loans.

Crucially, businesses and households might have adjusted to a new world of soaring prices by permanently changing their behaviour. If so, it could be very costly to return to the old world of low and stable inflation, requiring much higher interest rates, said Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank in Frankfurt.

Households and businesses need to respond aggressively or risk deep losses in purchasing power. Businesses can easily justify increasing their prices further if everyone else is doing the same. Trade unions are fighting to compensate employees in ways not seen in decades and attracting new members.

These changes mean that central banks will need to act more forcefully, pushing economies into a deeper downturn to break the new inflationary mind-set, Kraemer said. The ECB, for example, might need to increase its policy rate to 5% from the current level of 3.5%, he said.

For now, investors appear to doubt the hawkish tone emanating from central banks. Stock markets are resilient on both sides of the Atlantic, and investors are pricing in interest-rate cuts in the U.S. and Europe next year. That may be a mistake, according to some economists.

“The bottom line is that inflation at 5% remains too high, and it is clear that markets are under appreciating the Fed’s commitment to get inflation back to 2%,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management.

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

Why Inflation Around the World Just Won’t Go Away

Roughly a year into their campaign against high inflation, policy makers are some way from being able to declare victory

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.