Expansión en PIB nominal se ralentiza en EE UU: David Glasser

Genevieve Signoret

David  Glasser nota que el crecimiento del PIB se ralentiza:

Today’s announcement of the preliminary estimate of GDP for the fourth quarter of 2011 showed a modest improvement over the anemic growth rates earlier in the year, confirming the general impression that things have stopped getting worse. But we are barely at the long-run trend rate of growth, which means that there is still no recovery, in the sense of actually making up the ground lost relative to the long-run trend line since the Little Depression started.

The other striking result of the GDP report is that NGDP growth actually fell in the fourth quarter to a 3.2% annual rate, implying that inflation as measured by the GDP price deflator was only at a 0.4% annual rate, a sharp decline from the 2.6-2.7% rates of the previous three quarters. The decline reflects a possible tightening of monetary policy after QE2 was allowed to expire (though as long as the Fed is paying 0.25% interest on reserves, it is difficult to assess the stance of monetary policy) as well as the passing of the supply-side disturbances of last winter that fueled a rise in energy and commodity prices. So we now seem to be back at our new trend inflation rate, a rate clearly well under the 2% target that the FOMC has nominally adopted.

Despite the continuing cries about currency debasement and the danger of hyperinflation from all the usual suspects, current rates of inflation remain at historically  low levels.

Este hecho tiene especial relevancia para quienes debaten si la Fed debería practicar política monetaria por un régimen de objetivos de PIB Nominal (“NGDP Targeting”).