If the inflation-measured basket used house prices instead of rental costs, the story would be different.

Sir, Rana Foroohar points to “The latest Consumer Price Index figures show that almost all core inflation… was in rent or the owner’s equivalent of rent (up 0.3 per cent) [while] Core goods inflation, meanwhile, was down 0.2 per cent” and argues “that the housing market is once again completely out of sync with the rest of the economy.” “America’s new housing bubble” March 18.

Yes and no! No! “Rent” in much is a laggard response to the price of houses, and so it would be more precise for the arguments made by Foroohar to compare core goods inflation to what is happening to those prices.

Yes! “Hyman Minsky would have had a field day [more precisely many field years] with his Financial Instability Hypothesis that [argues] two kinds of prices — prices for goods and services, and asset prices.”

And yes, Daniel Alpert is correct: “What we have now is a form of inflation that’s never been seen before — it’s all concentrated in housing.”

To explain that with as “something the US Federal Reserve has actually exacerbated (albeit unintentionally) via low interest rates and quantitative easing that boosted housing prices in the very cities where the best paying jobs are located”, is correct but quite incomplete.

If banks needed to hold as much capital against residential mortgages as against for instance loans to entrepreneurs, something that was the case before the Basel Committee got creative, that would be happening much less.

As is, the resulting abundant easy financing when purchasing a house has helped morph houses from being homes into being investment assets. 

PS. In a letter I wrote and that FT published in 2006 (before it stopped doing so) titled “The information Mr Market receives could also be neurotic” I argued:

“Inflation as they, our monetary authorities, know it, is just obtained by looking at a basket of limited consumer goods chosen by bureaucrats and that although they might be highly relevant to the many have-nots, are highly irrelevant to measure the real loss of value of money. 

For instance, who on earth has decided for that the increase in the price of houses is not inflation? And so what should perhaps be argued is that really our monetary authorities have not been so successful fighting inflation as they claim they have been.”

@PerKurowski