PrefBlog

The New York Fed has released the latest Survey of Consumer Expectations:

The main findings from the January 2023 Survey are:

Inflation

• * Median inflation expectations remained unchanged at the year-ahead horizon, decreased by 0.3 percentage point at the three-year-ahead horizon, and increased by 0.1 percentage point at the five-year-ahead horizon, to 5.0%, 2.7% and 2.5%, respectively.
• * Median inflation uncertainty—or the uncertainty expressed regarding future inflation outcomes—remained unchanged at the one-year horizon but increased slightly at the three- and five-year horizons.
• * Median home price growth expectations declined by 0.2 percentage point to 1. 1% in January, the second lowest reading since May 2020. The decrease was more pronounced among respondents who are older than 60 and respondents who live in the Northeast.
• * Median year-ahead expected price changes increased by 1.0 percentage point for gas (to 5.1%), 1.4 percentage point for food (to 9.0%), and 0.1 percentage point for the cost of college education (to 9.3%) . The median expected change in the cost of rent and medical care remained unchanged at 9.6% and 9.7% , respectively.

Labor Market

• * Median one-year-ahead expected earnings growth remained unchanged at 3.0% in January. The series has been moving between a narrow range of 2.8% to 3.0% since September 2021.

I have attracted some opprobrium for my habit of referring to those whose investment strategies have been noisily inconvenienced by the cancellation of the RRB programme as ‘rich people’. I should correct myself and refer to them as ‘whining, privileged and oblivious rich people’:

A quarter of Canadians wouldn’t be able to come up with $500 to cover an unexpected expense, according to a new Statistics Canada survey that also found people who are younger and racialized report higher levels of financial stress than those who are older and non-racialized.

Worry about housing-related expenses, including rent, appeared to be driving the divide. More than half of survey respondents between the ages of 15 and 34 said they were “very concerned” that they would be unable to keep up with housing costs, compared with just over a quarter of respondents aged 65 and over.

Nearly three quarters of Black respondents, and 65 per cent of South Asians, shared the same sentiment, compared with less than 40 per cent of non-racialized respondents.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2023 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.