Vox Future Perfect 2024: Inflation will come in under 3 points?
3
13
70
2025
64%
chance

This resolves to Vox Future Perfect's judgement of this question.

In 2022, I predicted that inflation (measured by the Fed’s preferred metric) would stay below 3 percent; I was very wrong, as prices continued to rise at rates we hadn’t seen in decades. In 2023, I predicted inflation would stay above 3 percent; I was right, but inflation was falling rapidly by the end of the year.

It looks like 2024 will actually enjoy the kind of low inflation I projected two years ago. Prices will probably rise moderately, and interest rates will remain pretty high, but the big spikes we saw a while back won’t return. The Federal Reserve Board’s range of estimates for the year is between 2.3 and 3 percent, with the median at 2.4 percent. The Survey of Professional Forecasters, which pulls together estimates from economists at banks and other private-sector entities, finds that on average they put 23.2 percent probability on prices rising by more than 3 percent between the fourth quarter of 2023 and that of 2024.

I’m a little less confident than them, partly because the 2022 experience made me reduce my overall confidence in our collective ability to forecast price dynamics this far in advance. More to the point, the specific forces that drove prices high in 2022, like a semiconductor shortage and supply chain disruptions from Covid and the Ukraine war, do not seem likely to repeat next year. Then again, I didn’t see the Ukraine war coming, and it’s possible another curveball like that (maybe a Chinese incursion into Taiwan?) could send prices soaring. —DM

Vox's prediction was "65 percent"

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