Today we @ecb issued our new digital publication and interactive tool on inflation. It is one of our attempts to better explain the concept & measurement of inflation, its heterogeneity across goods and countries as well as the difference between perceived & actual inflation. 1/8
Chapter 1 explains the concept of inflation and why it matters. You can look at the inflation rate in a particular country for a particular category of goods and services, which gives an impression of the heterogeneity across countries and goods. 2/8
It also show the evolution over time for different countries, distinguishing the overall price index and certain subcategories, which show very different degrees of volatility: food, energy, non-energy industrial goods and services. 3/8
Chapter 2 is on inflation measurement. It explains how the basket of goods underlying the inflation index is compiled and shows the weights of different consumption categories. It also mentions the open issue of how to consider the costs of houses owned by consumers. 4/8
Chapter 3 deals with the distinction between measured inflation, personal actual inflation and personal perceived inflation. It explains the differences and shows how inflation perceptions differ across demographic groups: household income, education, gender and age. 5/8
It also shows that inflation perceptions tend to be substantially higher than measured inflation, that the gap has diminished somewhat over time and that the variation across households is very large. 6/8
Chapter 4 finally contains a personal inflation calculator, developed by @Lietuvosbankas, which allows euro area citizens to calculate their personal inflation rate and compare it with their own perception and with the measured rate for their country. Try it out! 7/8
The euro area economy is stagnating. But some countries are growing much faster than others. What explains this heterogeneity and how can we escape stagnation? This was the topic of my #WalterEuckenLecture @EuckenInstitut. 1/25
Weak growth reflects the exceptional shocks that hit the euro area economy in recent years as well as the tightening of monetary policy. Yet, although the peak impact of monetary tightening is likely to be behind us and real incomes are rising, growth remains shallow. 2/25
Aggregate growth figures mask, however, significant heterogeneity across euro area economies. Since interest rates started to rise, growth has become increasingly uneven. In Malta, Spain and Portugal, for example, output has expanded measurably. 3/25
In my speech at the BOJ-IMES conference, I reviewed the benefits & costs of asset purchases based on a large body of research. Central banks have used asset purchases for two main purposes: to stabilise financial markets and to ease financing conditions near the lower bound. 1/19
According to the signalling channel, asset purchases signal a commitment to a period of low interest rates, made credible by central banks’ exposures to duration risk. But this has not stopped central banks from raising rates when inflation surged, weakening this channel. 2/19
By contrast, the liquidity channel was powerful in times of stress. In a dash for cash, it is actual purchases that matter. On other occasions, it has been enough to credibly announce the intention to intervene if necessary, even if purchases were zero or small. #OMT #PEPP 3/19
As @paulkrugman once noted, “productivity isn't everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything.” Yet, the euro area’s productivity trajectory has been dismal. In today’s speech @EUI_EU, I asked how euro area firms could be turned from laggards into leaders. 1/20
At the turn of the millennium, the euro area was operating at the global productivity frontier. But in the following years, it fell behind other economies like the United States and has not been able to recover from this loss of competitiveness. 2/20
One root cause is firms’ failure to reap the efficiency gains from information and communication technologies. Over the past decades, a gap in the IT-related capital stock has emerged between the euro area and the United States, also leading to a gap in productivity growth. 3/20
Today we released our new experimental statistics on #DistributionalWealthAccounts (DWA). These data combine macroeconomic national accounts data from the Quarterly Sector Accounts with granular information from our #HouseholdFinanceAndConsumptionSurvey (HFCS). 1/6
We thereby benefit from the respective advantages of the two data sources: the timely and comprehensive coverage of aggregate wealth in national accounts, and rich distributional information in the HFCS. Linking micro & macro data is a promising step for closing data gaps. 2/6
As confirmed in our 2021 monetary policy strategy, we analyse the interaction between income & wealth distributions and monetary policy as part of the policy process. Distributional effects matter for monetary policy transmission and are part of our proportionality analysis. 3/6
Looking back at 2023, my most interesting (and experimental) communication experience was an interview with @SZ without words. #SagenSieJetztNichts #InterviewWithoutWords 1/14 sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/sagen-sie-jetz…
First question: What is inflation? 2/14
What does it look like when you want to convince Christine @Lagarde? 3/14
Yesterday I had the pleasure to deliver the Homer Jones Memorial Lecture at the @stlouisfed. In my speech I compared the disinflation process to long-distance running, arguing that "the last mile" is likely to be the hardest. 1/23
Headline inflation in the euro area declined rapidly to 2.9% in October from its peak of 10.6% one year earlier. The bulk of this large drop reflects the substantial decline in the contributions from energy and food inflation. 2/23
This is largely due to base effects. Oil and gas prices have come down fast from the highs in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to a recent IMF study, such base effects in the past have often given rise to “premature celebrations”. 3/23