RBI’s household inflation expectations survey- expectations just continue to rise

I had pointed about this new RBI survey which tracks and measures inflation expectations at household level. The last survey was till Mar-10 and now the new survey has been released for Jun-10. It is part of Oct-10 Monthly Bulletin.

So, what does the new survey say? Pretty much the same thing. Inflation expectations are expecetd to rise. Actually the measure of inflation is different from WPI and CPI. It is based on consumption basket of 4,000 households. Hence, in Jun-10 it was at 11.1% and is expected to rise by 30 bps during Jul-Sep 10 to 11.4% (which is over now) and around 80 bps to 11.9% by Jun-10.

Apart from this survey has some interesting points:

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September 2010 FOMC meeting minutes are a decent read

Most of the times minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee have a good round-up of US and global economy. It is quite detailed as well. Though, unlike minutes of Sweden Central Bank MPC the names of Fed members are not given unless he/she  has dissented from the consensus statement.  So, in Sweden you will get to read Lars Svensson’s views, Stefan Ingves’s views etc. In FOMC minutes, you don’t get these names except in case of dissent.

With the situation US is in, the minutes are providing an interesting reading. Especially the discussion on unemployment and policy options. I was reading the minutes of the meeting held on 21 Sep-10.

Reviewing India’s Fiscal Policy pre and post crisis

Rajiv Kumar and Alamuru Soumya of ICRIER have a nice paper reviewing the trends in India’s fiscal policy pre and post crisis. They review the trends of expenditure and revenues.

Google Price Index…

Google is one company which always has some surprises/exciting stuff lined up.

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google announced in National Association of Business Economists of a new initiative. Google is working on a project which analyses web-buying behavior to determine inflation trends. This project is called as Google Price Index or GPI. When CPI data is available to you with a lag of 14-21 days, this one could be like daily inflation trends. 

Varian explained that analysing web-price trends in US show clear deflation trends since last christmas. For UK we see slight inflation and this could be because of weakness in Pound Sterling.