During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers said that there is “a lot of momentum” for inflation and that the numbers he looks at show that “inflation’s not really coming down very fast, if it’s coming down at all, and that it’s way above the 2% target or any acceptable level.”
Summers said, “Inflation’s got a lot of momentum. The best single measure to look at for inflation is a kind of super core measure, which is wages or you can look at the median component of inflation. They’ve just been running strong for a long time and not decelerating. So, I think team transitory is engaged in a lot of wishful thinking.”
He added, “I’m looking at core measures. I’m looking at super core measures that take housing out, take used cars out, in addition to taking food and energy out. I’m looking at the so-called median inflation component, whatever product it is, that’s right in the middle. I’m looking at the so-called trimmed mean that looks at the middle half of the distribution of product prices. And very crucially for me, I’m looking at wages, which is a kind of super core measure because labor goes into everything. And all of those are saying that inflation’s not really coming down very fast, if it’s coming down at all, and that it’s way above the 2% target or any acceptable level.”
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