Inflation, Rents, and the Labor Market

Tying together some threads from recent data releases

There were plenty of reasons to fear an inflationary boom as the economy recovered from the initial shock of the coronavirus: massive government budget deficits, large-scale Federal Reserve bond-buying, the lifting of many pandemic restrictions, the stockpile of trillions of dollars of “excess savings” just waiting to get spent, a surge in retirements, …