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Singapore CPI Inflation 2.7% y-o-y (consensus 3.0%) in Mar-24

- Singapore's CPI inflation in March 2024 dropped to 2.7% y-o-y, lower than the market consensus of 3.0%, indicating a surprisingly steep moderation of price pressures.
- The inflation rate stands 1.34 percentage points below the one-year average, highlighting a persistent disinflationary trend in Singapore.

Policy Tightness is Gradations of Weak

• The PMIs mostly revealed surprise resilience in April, albeit with the US disappointing. Divergent surprises may reflect excessive spread changes in policy expectations.
• Residual seasonality may exaggerate current strength and unwind in the summer, but stability in unemployment trends still suggests global monetary policy is not that tight.
• Persistent excess demand requires tight conditions to be sustained. The BoE MPC seems desperate to cut, but resilience should delay it, including relative to Fed pricing.

By Philip Rush

Pill - Strategy and stance

In these remarks, Huw Pill assesses the inflation outlook in light of recent economic data, and offers his reflections on monetary policy strategy. He also discusses the recent Bernanke Review into the Bank of England's forecasting.

In his speech, Huw Pill discusses the monetary policy outlook for the UK. He states that the outlook for monetary policy has not substantially changed since March, despite a decline in headline inflation. He emphasizes the significance of Ben Bernanke's review of the Bank of England's macroeconomic forecasts and its role in shaping policy. Pill highlights the need for the MPC's policy process to be more robust in the face of uncertainties. He discusses the recent conjunctural data, which has offered little relevant news to alter his assessment of the monetary policy stance. Pill believes that headline CPI inflation will fall close to the 2% target in the coming months, but the focus should remain on the persistent component of inflation. He mentions signs of a downward shift in inflation but notes that there is still a way to go before stabilization. Pill also discusses the importance of having a monetary policy strategy that provides a framework for analysis and decision-making and emphasizes the need to get the basics right before implementing new models and frameworks. Overall, his assessment of the monetary policy outlook remains largely unchanged.


Positivity: 65
Uncertainty: 50

Lagarde - Unlocking the power of ideas

Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at Yale University in New Haven, USA

In her speech at Yale University, Christine Lagarde discusses the importance of generating and sharing new ideas for economic growth, particularly in the changing global economy. Lagarde emphasizes the need to break bottlenecks in three areas: translation of ideas into marketable projects, diffusion of innovations, and ambition to drive proactive leadership. She highlights the challenges faced by Europe in terms of financial systems, access to risk capital, trade frictions, and underutilization of internal scale. Lagarde calls for concrete actions to address these bottlenecks and asserts that Europe has the ambition and support needed to succeed.


Positivity: 85
Uncertainty: 45