Won't Someone at the Fed Think of the Millennials?

This isn't their parents' inflation.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
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For the Federal Reserve to succeed in its mandated bid to anchor inflation higher, it needs to overcome a big demographic hurdle: millennials don't expect prices to rise anytime soon.

There's a good reason for that: Americans who entered the workforce from 2000 onwards have experienced a benign inflation climate, with core Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) price inflation averaging just 1.7 percent, below the Fed's 2 percent target. And the PCE rate hasn't breached 2.5 percent at any point since the turn of the millennium.