Manufacturing purchasing managers reported that inflation worries are worse than the pandemic era. Worse than the pandemic era. The time when supply chains collapsed, ports shut down, and semiconductors became mythical artifacts. That era. Purchasing managers looked at their spreadsheets and decided the current moment is somehow more concerning than when container ships were playing bumper cars off Long Beach.
The survey pointed to purchasing managers struggling to stay ahead in a volatile environment. Staying ahead. That's the phrase they used. Like they're racing inflation on foot. Like they can outrun monetary policy by refreshing supplier emails faster. These are the same people who panic-ordered six months of inventory in 2021 and then acted surprised when warehouses became expensive storage units.
This adds pressure to the Fed. The Fed, which has spent two years raising rates, pausing, pivoting, hawking, dovish-pivoting, and generally performing interpretive dance for bond traders. Now purchasing managers have filed a complaint. The complaint is that things cost more. The Fed will take this under advisement, run it through seventeen econometric models, and then do whatever they were going to do anyway because Jerome Powell doesn't read manufacturing surveys at breakfast.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately checked their portfolios. They wanted to know if inflation being worse than the pandemic meant they should buy gold, Bitcoin, or shares of whatever company makes the machines that print the surveys. The answer is none of those things. The answer is that purchasing managers complaining about prices has exactly zero predictive value for your robinhood account. But you'll buy something anyway because the headline had the word Fed in it.
Inflation worries are worse than the pandemic era, which means absolutely nothing got better, we just got used to it.
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