1. Food - dominated by climate related bad harvests this year.

2. Oil - dominated by producer manipulation of stocks - see Chris Cook for more.

Isn't what we are seeing in some real estate and commodity markets inflation, just concentrated in those sectors?

Which is highly non-trivial, because most commodities are tradeables, which means you need to disaggregate changes to the real terms of trade, which are not inflation at all; inflation throughout the trade bloc, which is not greatly amenable to domestic policy fixes; and the actual domestic inflation.

But the fact that the price increases are concentrated in certain markets makes me inclined to believe that they are not inflation in the sense that corresponds to what is called inflation in standard macroeconomic models. It may be (in fact for some commodities very likely is) a bubble. But bubbles and inflation are not the same thing (despite the rhetorical convenience of such equation for chastising central bankers for not paying attention to asset bubbles), and have radically different interactions with policy.

And in any case, inflation is usually a good thing that we would want more of, so the question would be how to spread it out from those markets.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.