Optimism Abounds, but Many Factors Make It Difficult to Project

Bob Nakosteen started his discussion concerning the regional and national economy with a quick rejoinder that doubled as something to top everyone’s wish list.

“Well, if we put aside COVID…” he started while talking about the year ahead and, more specifically, about inflation and optimism that the Fed’s anticipated actions to raise interest rates will stem the rising tide of the past few quarters and bring it more under control in the months to come.

Overall (COVID notwithstanding), Nakosteen, a semi-retired professor of Economics at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, said most factors involving the economy are positive — everything from consumer confidence to jobless rates; from a still-white-hot housing market to persistent pent-up demand for goods and services, especially the former.

Of course, you can’t take COVID out of the equation, as much as we all might like to, and that’s why predicting just what will happen in 2022 with regard to the economy and the many forces that drive it is still somewhat of a crapshoot.

Still, there is general optimism when it comes to the big picture and matters such as inflation — even though the Fed and others have dropped the word ‘transitory’ when talking about the issue — confidence, supply chain, the stock market, and perhaps even the workforce crisis, said Nakosteen and others we spoke with.

Karl Petrick

“The Fed wants to make sure it doesn’t jam on the brakes and raise interest rates so fast that they cause the recession they’re trying to avoid. It’s not good to get a recession named after you.”

Indeed, earlier this month, in a note to clients, Marko Kalanovic, JPMorgan’s chief global strategist, wrote, “our view is that 2022 will be a year of a full global recovery, and end of the global pandemic, and return to normal conditions we had prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.”

All that might still happen in the next 12 months, but the events of the past few weeks show that recovery may be slower, and perhaps not as complete as JPMorgan projects.

Karl Petrick, a professor of Economics at Western New England University, told BusinessWest that inflation should ease up in 2022 and retreat from highs of nearly 7% (year over year) in November to below 5% and perhaps to 4% or even 3% in the months ahead.

He said soaring gas prices, triggered by the laws of supply and demand as the economy started to roar back to life roughly a year ago, have been a big factor in soaring inflation, and they have already started to fall.

“It takes time for supply to meet that surge in demand, and as oil suppliers rebound, we expect to see that price come down, and we’re already seeing some moderation,” he said, adding that, if the impact of Omicron on the global economy is substantial — and already there are signs of slowdown and even shutdown in some countries — then demand for energy (and, therefore, the prices for same) will come down.

“Regardless, we expect to see inflation moderate,” he said. “It will still be a little uncomfortable compared to what we’re used to — we had gotten used to prices going up 2% or 1% a year, and that was part of the shock we felt as prices really started to jump the second half of this year — but things will improve.”

One key to what happens with inflation is action on interest rates, said Nakosteen and Petrick, noting that the Fed is certainly paving the way for higher rates. In mid-December, the central bank announced plans to phase out its large-scale bond-buying program faster than initially planned. That will give the Fed more flexibility to raise rates, and 12 of the 18 members of the Fed’s rate-setting committee expect rates to rise by three-quarters of a percentage point or more in 2022.

While such action is expected to keep higher inflation from becoming more entrenched, there are risks and costs to raising rates, said Petrick, adding that the Fed wants to keep inflation in check without slowing the pace of growth or, far worse, putting the country on a course to a recession.

That’s what happened in the early ’80s, he said, when then Fed Chairman Paul Volker elevated interest rates to historic levels, which triggered a recession that, in many historical references, bears his name.

Bob Nakosteen

“I don’t think the Fed is going to have to raise interest rates to the point where it’s going to dip us into a recession.”

“The Fed wants to make sure it doesn’t jam on the brakes and raise interest rates so fast that they cause the recession they’re trying to avoid,” Petrick said. “It’s not good to get a recession named after you.”

Nakosteen agreed, and said that, overall, he’s in the camp that believes that higher inflation as was seen over the last three quarters of 2021 will be transitory — and not built into the economy, as others predict — but perhaps for a longer period than everyone would like. He also agrees that, while the Fed is talking tough about inflation and the need to keep it in check, its overall response will not be as tough as the talk.

“I don’t think the Fed is going to have to raise interest rates to the point where it’s going to dip us into a recession,” he told BusinessWest. “The economy is going to continue to grow, maybe not as quickly, inflation is going to come down over the next year, and interest rates are going to go up, but not by very much; it will affect the housing market and automobiles.”

Petrick agreed, projecting “pretty reasonable” growth for the year ahead, but adding quickly that events of even the past few weeks — the rise of Omicron and setbacks for President Biden’s Build Back Better program among them — have tempered some of those expectations.

“At the beginning of December, before we knew the Omicron variant was as prevalent as it was internationally, growth projections were pretty high, about 4% to 5% globally, and about 4% in the United States,” he said. “And then … those projections came down to about 3.7% to 3.8%, and now, with the doubts about the Build Back Better agenda getting through Congress, they’ve been downgraded again, to 3% to 3.5% on an annual basis next year — that’s the consensus that I’ve seen.

“But the first quarter will be pretty quiet, with about 2% growth, which was our average, pre-COVID,” he went on. “And that’s a big slowdown from this year, when we saw 5.5% growth overall, which was expected.”

As for the longer-term picture … Petrick said the consensus, if there is one, is that there will be continued growth in 2023, perhaps 2.5% to 2.9%. But as the events of the past few weeks have shown, things can change — and very quickly.

So projecting too far out is obviously difficult. For now, there is widespread if cautious optimism about which way the arrow will point in 2022.

But as Nakosteen noted, the past two long and mostly painful years have shown that there is simply no putting COVID aside. u

 

— George O’Brien