A Year Of Deflation Coming Up?

Being deeply in debt is like being grossly overweight. You’re carrying around this extra baggage that slows you down, and without continuous, conscious effort you tend to stop moving.

That’s the situation in which the world finds itself. The debts accumulated in the past couple of decades are weighing down the major economies, threatening to pull them back into recession if not countered by massive deficit spending and monetary ease. This, according to the following Bloomberg article, is causing prices to fall in most sectors:

IPhone Price Cuts Send Bond Inflation Bets to 11-Year Low
Price cuts on everything from iPhones to Folgers coffee show why investors in U.S. government bonds anticipate low inflation for the next decade even as the Federal Reserve considers injecting more cash into the economy.

A measure of price-increase predictions used by the Fed to set policy, the five-year, five-year forward break-even rate, has averaged 2.54 percent this year. That’s the lowest since 2001 for the measure, which gauges expectations for inflation between 2017 and 2022. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast that 10-year government bonds will yield 1.76 percent by Dec. 31, down from 2.76 percent in 2011 and 3.19 percent in 2010.

Bond yields show investors expect that soaring gasoline and corn prices will fail to spread throughout the U.S. economy amid a slump in wages and unemployment at more than 8 percent since the beginning of 2009. That’s giving the Fed scope to add to the $2.3 trillion of government securities it has bought since 2008, an option Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said last week is possible amid “grave concern” about joblessness.

“The bond market doesn’t view inflation as a problem,” Anthony Valeri, a market strategist in San Diego at LPL Financial, which oversees $350 billion of assets, said Aug. 28 in a telephone interview. “The bond market still views deflation as a greater risk to the economy for the next one to maybe two years.”

‘Constrained’ Budgets
Retailers are responding to sluggish economic growth by cutting prices. Sales rose 0.8 percent in July from the previous month, the biggest increase since February, government figures showed Aug. 14. That followed three straight months of declines, including a 0.7 percent drop in June, the most since May 2010.

“What we’re suffering through in the job market is reverberating through the economy,” Adolfo Laurenti, deputy chief economist in Chicago at Mesirow Financial Inc., which oversees $61.7 billion, said in a telephone interview Aug. 27. “These lackluster sales at many major retailers are really reflecting the fact that budgets are still constrained.”

Average hourly earnings rose 1.7 percent in July from a year earlier, the smallest increase since December 2010 and down from a peak of 3.8 percent in June 2007, the latest Labor Department data show. The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index was little changed at minus 47.3 in the week ended Aug. 26, from the prior reading of 47.4 that was the weakest since January.

Price Cuts
J.M. Smucker Co., which owns the Folgers coffee brand, lowered retail prices in May by about 6 percent as Arabica bean prices fell. Orrville, Ohio-based Smucker sees lower coffee costs for the remainder of the year, President and Chief Operating Officer Vincent Byrd said Aug. 17.

Procter & Gamble Co. (PG), the world’s largest consumer-products company, rolled back $400 million of the $3.5 billion in price increases it made last year, Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller said Aug. 3 during a conference call. The move boosted Cincinnati-based P&G’s U.S. market share of laundry detergents, including category leader Tide, by 0.6 percent in July, he said.

Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) cut its price for Apple Inc.’s 16 gigabyte iPhone 4S to $148 from $188, which was already cheaper than the manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $199. Second-quarter sales at Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores open at least a year gained 2.2 percent, below the 2.6 percent in the previous quarter, the company said Aug. 16.

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