A Taper Tantrum Could Follow This Inflation Spike
The fastest consumer price growth since the 1990s raises the risk that the Fed will end asset purchases more quickly. Markets won’t like it.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell is stuck in an inflation narrative he can’t break out of without turmoil.
Photographer: Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images
The Federal Reserve tried so hard to avoid a repeat of the 2013 “taper tantrum” — and was so successful in doing so — that it might just end up backfiring in a big way.
Just a week after the central bank announced that it would begin scaling back its $120 billion of monthly bond purchases at a pace that would last eight months, Labor Department data showed the U.S. consumer price index soared by 6.2% in October from a year earlier, the fastest annual pace since 1990. It advanced 0.9% just from September, the steepest increase in four months. Meanwhile, the core measure that excludes volatile food and energy prices jumped to 4.6%. Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged at his press conference last week that “the level of inflation we have right now is not at all consistent with price stability.” So, what would he say about this latest reading?