Economics
For ‘Inflation Guy’ (and Shiller), Medical TIPS Are ‘Holy Grail’
- Treasury advisers floated idea of debt tied to CPI components
- Previous tools for hedging specific inflation risk have failed
Photographer: shapecharge via Getty Images
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When the traders and investors who advise the U.S. Treasury floated the idea of selling bonds indexed to inflation in health care and education, they were drawing on work that Nobel laureate Robert Shiller began a generation ago.
It’s also work that Michael Ashton, a money manager who specializes in hedging specific inflation risk, latched onto more than a decade ago. That’s when he and Shiller tried -- unsuccessfully -- to create an exchange-traded mechanism for hedging the medical-care component of the Consumer Price Index.