Odd Lots - Isabella Weber On a New Way to Think About Inflation

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

In economics, there tends to be two dominant ways of thinking about inflation. Either you agree with Milton Friedman, who described inflation as always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon (the result... of too much money printing). Or you're more of a New Keynesian who thinks that higher prices are all about the relationship between demand and capacity. In a new paper inspired by Odd Lots and the series of disruptions that have rocked the economy since the global pandemic, UMass Amherst Economics Professor Isabella Weber describes a potential third way of thinking about inflation. She identifies systemically significant sources of inflation, or industries that could end up having a broader impact on a wide variety of prices. The hope is that by identifying these important sources of inflation early, policymakers can put in place measures to make sure price increases don't get out of hand. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Thanks for listening to Oddlots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast OddLots on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, I feel like I'm going to jinx things by saying this. But it feels like inflation is maybe starting to come down a little bit. At least it's not accelerating. Let's put it that way. Well, here's what I've been thinking about, which is that for the last year, the last year and a half, we've done all of these episodes on like supply chains and disruptions for this or that reason. And all of the various times we've used the term perfect storm to describe certain things in certain industries. Perfect storm of perfect storms. My guess right now, you know, in January, 2023, is that 2023's episodes will be a little less dominated by these topics. That would be my guess. I'm guessing that this year we do a few fewer perfect storm episodes.
Starting point is 00:01:13 I think that's right. But I think, you know, we spoke a lot about what it was that people didn't see coming when it comes to inflation. Why did a lot of economists get it wrong? Why was the inflation that was supposed to be transitory? You know, maybe it was transitory in the sense that it was narrow, you know, not a big sort of like macro unleashed inflation. But it definitely stuck around longer than a lot of people expected. And so every time we have these big questions, like why aren't we better at forecast inflation, it provides an opportunity to maybe learn something and start thinking about it in a slightly different way. Well, yeah, absolutely.
Starting point is 00:01:49 And I would say there's really two things that I feel are unanswered by all of the conversations that we've had in the last year. So one is still, like, is inflation like a macro or a micro thing? Did it happen because a few categories? really had some disruptions and then spilled elsewhere and therefore it's not really about fiscal or monetary policy specifically and b okay we do have very high inflation right now even if there's evidence coming down what tool like if it is the case that a lot of it is related to disruptions and chip shortages and freezes in texas etc what are the tools that are best to address that
Starting point is 00:02:31 because it is important to get inflation down but on the other hand there's a pretty good argument that if the issue is some sort of disruption at the ports or whatever, that sort of like strict blunt instruments like raising rates, raising rates, aren't necessarily the best approach to dealing with that kind of place. Or raising rates won't grow more trees to turn into lumber and things like that. Or more births at the ports or anything like that. So I'm so glad you said that because today we are going to be speaking with one of our Oddlott's favorites.
Starting point is 00:02:59 And she has just written a new paper, which she says is inspired by some of the conversations that we've had. on odd lots, but it's also just really interesting because it presents a new sort of third way intentionally of thinking about inflation. Not transitory, not persistent, a new more interesting third option and that maybe could help us think about ways of accepting, yes, inflation is real, it is a problem, but that some of these blunt instruments that just treat inflation as a function of there's too much money in the economy, we need there to be less, maybe there are better approaches.
Starting point is 00:03:35 than just this sort of like blunt monetary approaches to addressing them. Absolutely. So without further ado, we are going to be speaking today to Isabella Weber. She is, of course, a economics professor over at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and you might remember her from some previous episodes. So Isabella, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots. Thank you so much for having me.
Starting point is 00:03:58 It's a pleasure. Thank you. So the paper is called inflation in times of overlapping emergencies. systemically significant prices from an input output perspective. But I just want to get you to say on camera that this is inspired by odd bots. It is. I mean, I have been listening to your podcast all through the pandemic. And as you were just saying, obviously, you have been tracing all these price shocks that have
Starting point is 00:04:25 been rippling through the economy. So this paper is trying to come up with a framework to trace these shocks and ripple effects in a somewhat more aggregate and possibly less fine print, but maybe a little bit more like formal kind of fashion. I love that. The most self-serving first question we've ever asked on an interview. What is, you know, what is an input-output approach mean? Because my understanding is that this is actually like a very old idea in economics, but that is some kind of, it's actually been forgotten is my understanding and that this sort of like various versions of monitorist thinking which sort of treat if prices are high if we want to understand prices we just look at how much money
Starting point is 00:05:13 or how much credit is in the economy rein that in and you seem this paper seems to be like going back to like an older tradition in economics can you talk a little bit about what this is yeah so as you said we tend to think about inflation as a macro phenomenon right where it's basically just about the movement of aggregate measures whereas what we are trying to do here is to think of prices as kind of an interconnected network where since one sector's output is another sector's input and therefore one sector's output prices are the cost of another sector, you can kind of trace the price movements across the whole production network, which input-output tables allow you to do. So these tables basically like
Starting point is 00:05:59 the relationships of input and outputs across the whole economy. Historically, input-output tables really had a breakthrough during the war time, where the question was, how can we hit the enemy's economy in ways that we kind of, like, with the minimal number of bombs, to create the maximum damage to really, I mean, undermine the enemy economy's ability to even fight a war. I mean, concretely, of course, this is mainly about the German economy. And so therefore, it really is a method of identifying points
Starting point is 00:06:43 that are of particular systemic significance for the economy as a whole. Back then, the idea was to identify these points of vulnerability to, I mean, as I said, create destruction. The idea of our paper is to say, if we can identify these points of vulnerabilities, then we can actually kind of know what the potential sources of these ripar effects that can create macro outcomes could be. So if some prices matter more than others, we want to know what these prices are. And input output is one method of trying to identify these systemically significant sectors. So Tracy, my takeaway from that is that in a war.
Starting point is 00:07:27 It makes more sense to say bomb an oil refinery than a candy factory. Like if you're thinking about, well, what are these sectors that will have the biggest ripple effects across the economy, then that would be the implication. Well, maybe we should talk about morale in that context. But no, okay. There's another analogy that you use in the paper, which is, you know, if you're trying to identify systemically important sources of inflation and maybe address them before they start actually. contributing to price increases. It's kind of like trying to identify systemically important banks and then making sure that they, you know, hold more regulatory capital or maybe go under preemptive stress tests or things like that. Can you talk about maybe, you know, before we get into
Starting point is 00:08:15 policy solutions, can you talk about how that approach maybe differs to traditional ways of thinking about inflation? Because, you know, in my mind, there's really, there's the monetarist view. It's all about the money supply, and then there's a sort of new Keynesian view where it's more about, you know, supply side and capacity and demand and things like that. Can you place this new approach in the context of those two older ways of thinking about it? So as different as like kind of monetarism and new Keynesianism can be, they share the understanding that inflation is always driven by macroeconomic factors, right? Now, what we are doing here, I mean, in one case, it's the distance from aggregate capacity utilization. In the other case, it's more that classic story of too much money chasing too few goods,
Starting point is 00:09:05 but still it's like trying to locate the origins of inflation on the aggregate level. What we are trying to do here is to say, well, if there are micro origins of inflation, if shocks to specific sectors can matter in ways that they can unleash processes, that actually unsettle the stability of prices overall, then we want to understand what these sectors are. We want to know where these points of vulnerability are so that we can react to these shocks before they kind of ripple throughout the whole system.
Starting point is 00:09:43 And as you said, interest rates are already being recognized as a systemically significant kind of price, right? That's why we have central banks, which of course historically at some point was also not the case. So it was a historical evolution to recognize the systemic significance of interest rates. So in some sense, what we are arguing here is to say that there are more prices than the price of borrowing money that can acquire systemic significance in ways that can have very large implications for monetary stability. Just a shout out, we are drawing here on the work also of Sao Omerova,
Starting point is 00:10:20 who has been working on systematically significant prices for a while. Someone else we definitely have to have on the podcast at some point. It's so funny because, you know, of course, and we talked about this the last time you were on late last year, you took a lot of heat for saying, well, maybe there's a time for having some discussion about price controls, everyone freaked out about that, and yet they're like, okay, now let's control the price of money, as if that isn't a form of price control. And yet, of course, central banking, the ultimate price control. The ultimate price control. But, you know, so I joked, but I guess it's not really a joke that, like, there are some areas where it's kind of obvious that some sort of functions in the economy are more crucial to other industries than others. So an oil refinery is going to be more crucial to other industries than a candy factory. But that's obvious. How do you go about systematically identifying beyond the sort of really crude examples? What is this sort of like a rigorous?
Starting point is 00:11:20 or empirical approach to actually identifying what parts of the economy are, in fact, the most likely to have ripple effects elsewhere? So what we have done in this paper is that we have simulated shocks to every industry in the input-output-table and just for orientation, it's 71 industry, so it's not super disaggregated, I mean, also not super aggregate compared to macroeconomic variables, but it's still fairly broad, right? So we run a shock on each of these sectors, and then we simulate how this shock, shock runs through the whole economy, residing in an indirect impact on the CPI, right? Because if the price of oil goes up, the price of plastic goes up, the price of plastic toys
Starting point is 00:12:02 goes up. So therefore, in the CPI, you do not only have the direct effect of people consuming fuel or gas, but you also have indirect effects of plastic and plastic toys and then in all sorts of packaging and so on, right? So we are tracing this direct and indirect effect that resides from a price shock in any one individual sector. And we run this simulation for every separate sector so that we then get distinct magnitudes that show us whether a shock to one sector matters more in comparison to another sector.
Starting point is 00:12:40 In other words, we can create a ranking of what we call the total inflation impact from a shock in these sectors. Now, with the simulation, we basically have three determinants that can render a sector systemically significant. The first determinant is the bait in the CPI. And housing is a great example here. Housing is not something that is very upstream and that creates a lot of ripple effects in other industries, but it has a very large weight in the CPI, right? So therefore, if there is a price change in housing, it has a pretty large impact. on the CPI. Something like oil and gas is actually pretty upstream,
Starting point is 00:13:25 but not as upstream as something like wholesale trade because of the ways in which the upstreamness measures are constructed. But for oil and gas, you have very large price movements. So the magnitude of the shocks that we use are either using average volatility in the two decades before the pandemic or using the actual price change in the pandemic and in the context of the Ukrainian war. So in oil and gas, we actually had very large price movements already before the pandemic,
Starting point is 00:13:55 and then again during the pandemic and in the context of the war. So here the drivers would be kind of all three components, the importance in terms of indirect effects creating a relatively large total weight in the CPI, the large price movements, and relatively upstream, even though not as to be a large, upstream as wholesale trade. Whereas for wholesale trade, it's really basically because of the upstreamness of that sector. And then in the pandemic, of course, we also had fairly large price movements there. But before the pandemic, the price movements in wholesale trade would have been much smaller than in something like oil and gas extraction, right? So it's these three dimensions that we are
Starting point is 00:14:40 capturing in creating this ranking. So just on this point, can I just press you, when it comes to identifying the systemically important industries, or I think you call them ubiquitous industries, like how do you disaggregate their weight in the inflation indices versus the extent to which they matter for other prices? Because I'm sure there will be some people who listen to this and say, like, well, obviously energy and, you know, maybe some consumer goods and things like that have a higher weight in the CPI. And so that's why you're getting these results. If you look at the paper, which I'm not expecting anyone to do, we can distinguish between a direct and an indirect effect. Right.
Starting point is 00:15:28 So what our direct inflation impact is, is just the weight in the CPI, right? This is just giving you, this is what the CPI shows us is the weight of the change in, say, petroleum and core products for the change in the CPI. But then there's this additional share, which we call the indirect effect, which comes from tracing the indirect price movements that reside from this initial shock in, say, petroleum and coal products. Now, of course, we have to make assumptions on how industries hand over cost increases, right? in the paper we make two distinct assumptions. One is that it's just a pass-through of 100%. So firms just have a cost increase and just pass this on to their customers. The second assumption that we make is to say,
Starting point is 00:16:25 what if firms actually don't just pass on the cost, but they actually want to protect their profit margins. Now, if their costs go up and they were to increase prices by just the amount of the increasing cost, their profit margin would go down, right? So what if they actually protect their profit margin? So therefore, increase prices by more than the increase in costs. So this then gives us different magnitudes of the total effect,
Starting point is 00:16:54 but we find that the rankings are relatively stable, independent of these different assumptions that we are making. And the CPI that we are using here is a synthetic CPI, because of course we have to break it down to these 70, one industries that we have. So it's it's it's it's it's it's not the CPI that you download from the BA if you just look for CPI but it's a CPI that you get from the VA if you look into input output tables. You know something I'm interested in and I don't know if it's something you've specifically looked at but it sort of reminds me of this like you know we talk a lot about or
Starting point is 00:17:46 economists have talked a lot in the last year about goods versus services inflation as if these are like two distinct categories of types of types of. of things that people buy that you can draw a bright line and say, okay, goods have gone down, but service is still up. But it seems to me that any good that we buy is also implicitly a bundle of services that need to go into the, you know, if I buy a refrigerator, well, there's some sort of service person who help delivery, deliver the furniture. And there are services for, you know, the truck driver, whatever it is. Does your approach, this sort of input output approach, sort of, I'm trying to think exactly the way to phrase that, but in your view, does it offer a more
Starting point is 00:18:29 useful way of thinking about categories of goods beyond just sort of would seem to me like these arbitrary distinctions between the types of things that get bought in the economy? Good question. Yeah, great question. I mean, I would of course say yes. Okay, thank you. Thank you for saying that's a great question. Okay, no, sorry, keep going. To be sure, services are part of the input output tables and we actually find that they are pretty upstream because of the fact that you just described, right? Because there is like some form of even like small administrative service involved in pretty much everything.
Starting point is 00:19:07 So if we talk about it, sorry, if we talk about upstream sectors, we tend to think about the physical stuff like oil and gas or metals or chemicals and so on, right? what we actually see when we do the analysis is that some services are very upstream. Now the price movements in services are relatively small on average over time because they're very much tied to wages, right? And wages tend to move much less than, let's say, commodity prices, right? So therefore, when we run these shocks, the service sectors, even though they are pretty upstream, end up not being very important for the general movement of prices in this model, because
Starting point is 00:19:56 just the initial shock is so small if we model the shock based on magnitudes of past price movements and price movements in the COVID-19 inflation. Now, I do think that this kind of does give us a different way of distinguishing categories of sectors if you want so, because the idea here really is to say, okay, we don't care if it's services or if it's commodities or if it's processed goods or if it's manufacturing or whatever it might be, but all that we care about is the importance of this sector, if you want it's centrality
Starting point is 00:20:37 in relation to all other sectors and in relation to people's consumption patterns. Right. So what we find then is that the sectors that we identify is systemically significant are basically in three groups. So it's like basic necessities, stuff like housing, food, farms that of course produce a lot of food, utilities, and of course also energy. And then basic production inputs, stuff like the fossil fuels that we have already talked about, but also chemical products. And then kind of like basic circulation infrastructure. So things like,
Starting point is 00:21:16 wholesale trade, right, which is critical for commerce. It's kind of a basic commercial infrastructure. So I do think that this does give us a different way of kind of distinguishing the nature of different sectors. So once you've identified these systemically important industries, you know, these ubiquitous industries for inflation, things like basic necessities, housing, farms, food and utilities and energy, how does that influence? form the policy response? So the idea here is that because these sectors are so important that if there are large price movements in these sectors that this has implications way beyond these specific sectors,
Starting point is 00:22:05 we should be paying more attention to what is happening in these sectors. So the first implication is to say we need more monetary capacity. Why do we need more monitoring capacity? Because we are living in some sort of an age of overlapping emergencies, right? Where we have, of course, a pandemic that is not over, looking, for example, at what's happening in China and how this impacts global production networks, but also looking at climate change and your great episode on the Mississippi River and how this is kind of just making a whole sector, in this case, of course, grain, and other commodities. grind to a hold. But we also have these massive geopolitical tensions that can have huge implications for the ways in which production is organized globally.
Starting point is 00:22:55 So in other words, it seems very likely, from my perspective, that more shocks will be in the pipeline. Of course, no one wants these shocks, and everybody is hoping that things will be calm and stable. But like from the perspective of the dynamics of overlapping emergencies, even if you're going to be calm, even if inflation is now easing, it seems like in the next couple of years, these kind of shocks are likely to keep coming. So if that is the case, you kind of want to have capacity on the side of the state
Starting point is 00:23:26 to be able to monitor these sectors that are so important in ways that allow you to react to these shocks before they kind of create these huge cascading effects throughout the whole economy, you then actually get some sort of potentially more generalized kind of inflation. Beyond monitoring capacity, of course, not enough to watch. You want to be able to kind of step in and stabilize, right?
Starting point is 00:23:56 And here then, I think the big shift in policy thinking that emerges from this paper is that once we go on the sector or level, we kind of leave the world of more or less homogeneous aggregates where we can talk about interest rates up by 1% or down by 1% or 0.5 or 0.75 or whatever. But it's a pretty one dimension, right? And pretty clear that there's a one dimension that we can measure in very clear ways quantitatively in percentage points, very straightforward. If we now think about the prices of chemicals or the stability of the flow of goods and
Starting point is 00:24:38 wholesale trade and therefore the prices attach. to wholesale trade or the prices of commodities, we enter the word of qualitative differences, right? We enter the word of the last two years of Oglot's episodes, right, where you have been unpacking this incredible amount of detail on the qualitative differences that have huge quantitative implications for pricing, but that require quite an extraordinary attention. extent of understanding of the specifics of these sectors. So to be able to react to shocks in these sectors, I think one would really need quite a bit of capacity that is quite tailored to these sectors.
Starting point is 00:25:28 So there's no like kind of one solution that does it all. If you think about housing versus oil refineries, you would obviously need a very different kind of policy approach, right? So this then means that kind of these, and I mean, there is a lot of capacity out there, but it needs to be connected back to the question of macroeconomic and monetary stability. It's always so funny to me that there exists a data point on the terminal that the Fed monitors called capacity utilization, is if there's, as if the concept of industrial capacity could ever be homogenized in a single index of like, here's refining capacity, here's apartment capacity, here's capacity, here's capacity to,
Starting point is 00:26:11 make cars, like, it just like sort of blows my mind that that's like a, that that could ever be boiled down to a single number. Let me ask you a random question. Is there a sector or a part of the economy that in your research surprised you as having more ripple effects across other prices than you might have expected that maybe people, I mean, oil is obvious, right? We all know that everything needs energy or whatever. But are there sectors that maybe people don't think of that have outsized effects? Generally speaking, I would say that the resides are not terribly surprising, which might make you say, like, yeah, then why bother modeling it? To which I would answer, well, it is nice to kind of be able to capture these aggregate
Starting point is 00:26:52 effects and trace them in a systematic way throughout the economy. One of the sectors that I think is quite interesting is chemical products, like, which is just in everything, right? It's like as ubiquitous almost as fossil fuels and is incredibly important. apparently is also important not only like from a quantity perspective of composition of production, but also from a price perspective. So this is one that I personally hadn't thought about as much. I think wholesale trade kind of came very much to the top of our minds in the pandemic, but our simulations before the pandemic also show that wholesale trade was already pretty important,
Starting point is 00:27:40 which again is something that I think like from the pre-COVID mindset would not have been something that I would necessarily have associated with thinking about inflation. Wait, sorry, real quick, what wholesale trade mean? You said, what specifically are you talking about? Yeah, so wholesale trade again, like this is actually one of the points where probably the level of aggregation can become a problem. I mean, generally speaking, it's stuff like logistics, but also wholesale traders. I mean, any kind of company that, um, that basically does whole same merchandising, right?
Starting point is 00:28:13 Okay. Which, yeah. So Isabella, can I ask, one thing you mentioned in your paper, you talk about the possibility of minimum inventory requirements. So if you know that a specific industry or thing is important from an inflation perspective, maybe we should build in additional inventory, some resilience into the system.
Starting point is 00:28:48 And this is, you know, inventories, the idea of businesses moving to just in time and maybe being a little bit more vulnerable to big shocks and demand. This is almost classic odd lots territory. And it seems like the difficulty there is how do you encourage companies to build up that extra capacity in their system when maybe their incentives are more skewed towards, you know, just making money and profits and short-term things. How do you actually go about doing that? How realistic is it? Yeah, absolutely. Great question. And I think that, I mean, if it is about,
Starting point is 00:29:25 making money and some of the companies that have experienced bottlenecks actually have experienced that they have managed to increase their prices in ways that granted them even more profitable than before the pandemic right so then your incentive of increasing your inventory might actually be pretty low because you think like in normal times I don't want to have inventories because I want to be as efficient as I can be and then if shocks hit if everybody is kind of running this same model, like all competitors in one segment are running this same model. So then they all don't have a lot of inventories.
Starting point is 00:30:05 Then there's this sector-wide supply chain shock, which allows them to hike prices in ways in which they could not hike prices at normal times because now they kind of have this mutual knowledge of shortage. And then they end up being actually in a pretty good position, which we have seen in some of, some of the sectors that have experienced extreme impacts on these supply chains during the pandemic, right? So therefore, we somehow need a way to get out of this.
Starting point is 00:30:36 And I think because of what I just laid out, it's not clear that companies by themselves would necessarily increase their inventories and ways that sufficiently prevent this situation, at least not to the extent as it would be like kind of socially desirable or desire. from a more like macroeconomic kind of standpoint. How to do it practically, again, like I really see this paper as providing a framework and kind of starting a conversation. And I think to get to the question of how to do it practically, one really has to start talking to people who understand inventory management and companies rather than me like kind of as the armchair economists coming up with some sort of fix
Starting point is 00:31:22 all the inventories of US corporations and wants type of. approach. We're almost out of time. I have one very short question, but you know, we did an episode recently, and it was pointed out by one of our guests that the way a lot of economists think is that if the price of gas goes down, for example, that doesn't improve inflation because the sort of general equilibrium, well, that's more money in people's pockets and they're just going to spend more on haircuts now, or they're just going to spend more on cars. Why does that... I think there's a limit to how many haircuts people are. Yeah, right, or maybe they'll spend more on going out to eat, okay? So, And then it doesn't really get us anywhere.
Starting point is 00:31:58 Like, what do you say? I'm just curious your response to that. That's like, okay, you target a sector, great. You target energy, great. But then everything's cheaper. People have more money and they spend elsewhere and you don't get anywhere. Why should that not, why is that not a fatal flaw of your approach? I mean, this is the famous, I mean, one of the famous Friedman,
Starting point is 00:32:15 Milton Friedman quotes also where he's saying exactly what you just said. We're back to like the sort of core monitors thinking. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this then kind of brings you back to. the question of how firms are setting prices, right? And if we are in a situation where we have very highly concentrated corporate structures, which I think is a fairly fair description of large parts of the American economy, then we can actually
Starting point is 00:32:42 see that the demand response, sorry, that the price response to demand is surprisingly small in many cases, that the prices are actually quite surprisingly stable. I mean, if you think back to the two decades, decades before COVID, where of course, there have been periods of more demand and less demand and so on, but prices were surprisingly stable, right? And everybody was a kind of surprising, why are prices so stable? Well, because in very concentrated sectors, firms tend to compete over market share, compete over conquering new segments of markets, compete over cutting, costs and so on less than using any kind of small increase in demand by immediately raising prices, right? Because if you raise prices and your competitor doesn't raise prices because both of you are price makers and not price takers, then that can actually harm you. So therefore,
Starting point is 00:33:42 in the kind of institution setting that we find ourselves in, I don't think it's clear that if people spend less on gas, then immediately. the prices of everything else that they are consuming are going up. And I also don't think that this is something that we see empirically that the price of gas and oil going down the inflation and other parts of the economy suddenly like going up by any large margins. Isabella, we're going to have to leave it there. But thank you so much for coming on odd lots.
Starting point is 00:34:15 You're definitely one of our favorites. And I'm not just saying that because you've translated the past two years into actual academic research. Fascinating discussion. Thank you so much, Isabella. That was great. Thank you. Thanks, Isabella. That conversation was great.
Starting point is 00:34:41 And the paper is definitely worth a read, although I know Isabella said she didn't think anyone was actually going to read it. One thing I was thinking is it does kind of go back to remember some of the conversations we had with Stephanie Kelton on modern monetary theory. And, you know, her solution was, well, we need, instead of reducing spending, like maybe we identify where the bottlenecks are happening and we increase capacity or try to increase capacity. And my criticism of that was it's difficult to do it in real time. But I think studies like this maybe go some way towards identifying where to look, right? I think this use of input output tables and is Isabella said is actually a very old thing that you never hear mainstream economists talk about. You know, it's like very useful idea. And like, okay, it's like difficult.
Starting point is 00:35:31 Sure, it's a lot more difficult to like identify critical sectors than it is to just. raise rates when CPI comes in higher than expected but it's doable and I did read the paper but when I say I read the paper what I mean is I read the first four pages skipped over the 40 pages of equations. You have to see the intro and then the conclusion. Yeah so I read the I read the intro I skipped over like all the equations and Greek symbols or whatever and then the conclusion and I thought it was really interesting and I think like I suspect and maybe as a result of all this, the pandemic and everything, there might be renewed interest in this sort of like pretty rigorous approach to identifying critical sectors and how they distribute prices across the economy.
Starting point is 00:36:15 Exactly this. I would be really disappointed if we came out of the past two or three years without a sort of like new way of thinking about inflation or at least maybe an additional dimension. Yeah. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Isabella Weber. She's at Isabella M. Weber.
Starting point is 00:36:42 And check out her paper, inflation in times of overlapping emergencies, systemically significant prices from an input output perspective. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin and Dash Bennett at Dashbot. And check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at Podcasts. And for more odd lots content, go to Bloomberg. dot com slash odd lots where we post transcripts Tracy and I blog and we write a weekly newsletter every Friday go there, subscribe to it, get it in your inboxes. Thanks for listening.

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