from Zero Hedge
Authored by Peter St. Onge via The Mises Institute,
Will inflation turn into stagflation? With inflation hitting 40-year highs, it’s the question of the hour.
Currently, Wall Street and the Fed are saying no, forecasting a respectable 3.7% real for 2022, 2.7% for 2023, and 2.3% for 2024. These aren’t epic prints, but they’re also nowhere near recession.
Of course, that same dream team of Wall Street and Fed missed inflation to an epic degree last year: in mid-October of 2021 the Wall Street Journal’s survey of economists were predicting 5.25% inflation by December—just two months later. Actual CPI in December was an annualized 9.5%, and it was 7.1% on a year-on-year basis. That’s pretty embarrassing for a two-month prediction of a large aggregate like inflation.