Courtesy of Mish.
Price Deflation Hits Italy First Time in 55 Years
The Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) reports that consumer price inflation declined by 0.1% from August 2013 to August 2014.
Italian consumer prices fell 0.1 percent year-on-year in August of 2014, matching preliminary estimates. The country’s annual inflation rate touched the negative territory for the first time in nearly 55 years due to a drop in energy prices.
Year-on-year, prices of energy fell 3.6 percent in August, mainly driven by a 1.2 percent drop in cost of non-regulated energy products. Additional downward pressures came from food cost (-0.5 percent), mainly unprocessed food (-1.8 percent) and communication (-9.0 percent). Meanwhile, prices of services slowed (0.6 percent in August compared with a 0.7 percent increase in July).
Italy CPI 2000 – 2014
Eurozone Policymakers Concerned About Falling Prices
A Financial Times headline portrays falling prices as a negative thing: Deflation Takes Shine Off Sales for Italy’s Shopkeepers.
The appearance of deflation in Italy suggests a worrying spread from Spain, another peripheral eurozone economy, where it reared its head this year. Deflation is now stalking the home of Rome-born Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank president, who has sounded the alarm about the need to restore growth across the continent and has taken aggressive and unorthodox measures to do so.
Matteo Renzi, the youthful prime minister who gained power in February with an agenda of radical economic and political reform, acknowledged last week that growth would in fact be “around zero” this year.
The hope is that lower prices will start luring Italians back to the shops. But policy makers – particularly Mr Draghi and other ECB officials – do not seem to be betting on the resurgence of the Italian consumer.
They have been more focused on – and fearful of – the worst case: that the country, along with the eurozone more generally, could fall into a deflationary spiral, in which consumers hold off purchases in the expectation that prices will fall even further. Deflation would also raise the real value of Italy’s monumental €2.1tn public debt load, causing angst among investors.
“Even if you think the probability of damaging deflation is low, if it were to happen it’s a disaster,” says Erik Nielsen, global chief economist at UniCredit, the Italian bank. “The ECB was right to take out an insurance policy against it,” he adds, referring to measures including interest rate cuts the central bank took this month.
Deflationary Spiral Nonsense…
