德银19日的全球经济视点，英文24页：

■ Gridlock in Washington and some very recent declines in inflation have led investors to mark down noticeably their expectations for inflation over the years to come. We think this revision is misguided. Inflation risks in the US have shifted significantly to the upside, and the move from deflation risk to rising inflation elsewhere around the globe has been impressive.

■ Across major countries, with the exception of Japan, underlying or core inflation has generally been moving upward--in some cases nearing central bank targets. Headline inflation has been boosted even further by earlier rises in energy and food prices, which in some cases are now being partly reversed.

■ The reflation process has advanced furthest in the US. Indeed, the prospective further tightening in the US labor market poses risks of a potentially significant overshoot of inflation in the years to come. Empirical research by various Fed economists, as well as our own analysis of the data, indicates that the responsiveness of inflation to labor market tightening increases nonlinearly as unemployment falls increasingly below NAIRU.


■ So far, US unemployment has moved only modestly below NAIRU, but even with just moderate GDP growth (i.e., growth that is not boosted by fiscal expansion), continued sluggish productivity performance, and a resumption of the secular downtrend in labor force participation, the unemployment rate could easily move more than a percentage point below NAIRU over the next two years--a development not seen since the inflationary 1960s and 70s.

■ The rest of the world is still well behind the US in this regard, and not at risk of an imminent surge in inflation, but resource utilization has tightened enough in the global economy that it will not provide the kind of pressure release valve to damp inflation that it has in the recent past.

■ The upshot for policy is that we see the Fed adopting a more hawkish stance than the market currently anticipates, while central banks in Europe and Asia generally, though gradually, shift from an easing stance toward a tightening stance.