Fed's Lockhart Speaks: Ignore Reality, Inflation Is Transitory

04-08-2011 • ZeroHedge.com

The borg collective is out in full force, with more gibberish on 'transitory inflation' coming from Atlanta Fed's Lockhart: "As I've said before, my expectation is that commodity price increases that are now translating into accelerating headline inflation will be transitory. In support of this claim, I'll make three points. First, these increases have been driven by global pressures in markets for food commodities, energy, and other commodities. These pressures are largely the result of supply-and-demand factors, some of which are one-off in nature. Second, inflation indices are made up of a wide spectrum of goods and services that don't uniformly have these commodities as inputs. Roughly two-thirds of consumer spending is on services, which are not materials-intensive. And, third, to the extent that some goods and services have these commodity inputs, the pass-through to ultimate consumer prices is limited." Fair enough: on the other hand one can present the following point indicating inflation is only transitionary to higher prices: "reality."