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Tom McNabb's avatar

Charles Hayden, in the September 12 edition (#17) of the Applied MMT podcast introduces the idea of aggregating prices from [The Chicago?] futures market, as, he points out, all inflation metrics are [slightly] past measures and so have no predictive value. I suppose its a version of expectations with the twist that those prices are already embedded in the present moment, by those expectations of the traders, into forward pricing. I just heard that one yesterday, so beyond that it's intriguing, don't have my own opinion.

Separately, for those people such as myself in the gougeflation-light (Piketty's r>G) camp, I wonder what the metrics are that that camp uses.

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Brian Romanchuk's avatar

Hi, I just saw this. You can use futures to get an "edge" on CPI releases, since there is a lag from wholesale to retail prices, and then there is a publication lag for CPI. However, I am interested here in theories that can be used to generate a forecast on a longer horizon, and what are the driving non-price variables.

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Tom McNabb's avatar

I see, Futures *as inflation theory* doesn't sound very fruitful. Though, it does lead into "price setting" as a larger category.

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Neil Wilson's avatar

There's also the new kid on the block - VAR models.

Or curve fitting to a belief.

They need to speak to some early 2000s momentum traders to see how that turned out.

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Brian Romanchuk's avatar

I just saw this. That's not really a "theory," but a statistical blender to generate a forecast. You need a theory to decide what variables to throw in the blender.

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