Extreme Disagreement Among Households About the Long-Term Inflation Outlook

Apollo Chief Economist

There is extreme disagreement among households about the long-term inflation outlook and whether the Fed will keep inflation under control over the coming 5 to 10 years, see chart below and here.

The University of Michigan investigated the source and found that one reason was that they had switched their survey methodology from phone interviews to web interviews. Survey respondents are more willing to express high inflation expectations during web interviews than during phone interviews. The problem with this argument is that you would think that the same bias would also be present for households with lower inflation expectations. Despite this methodological difference, the bottom line remains that half of the population has extreme long-term inflation expectations, which is a problem for the Fed and its credibility.

For more, see https://data.sca.isr.umich.edu/fetchdoc.php?docid=6082.

Extreme disagreement among households about the long-term inflation outlook
Source: University of Michigan, Haver Analytics, Apollo Chief Economist

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