Bond prices last summer suggested consumer prices in the United States were expected to rise only<br />1.4 percent annually over the next five years; that soared to 1.96 percent in late January.<br />The Low-Inflation World May Be Sticking Around Longer Than Expected -<br />Get the Upshot in your Inbox<br />There is a worldwide glut that includes oil wells, steel plants<br />and eager would-be workers, and it will take more than a United States presidential election and a few months of solid global growth to fix it.<br />If the economy works the way the textbooks say it should,<br />that should feed back into higher incomes, higher consumer demand and higher prices in the months ahead.<br />Finally, after an uptick in oil prices in 2016 and an abrupt shift in sentiment after Donald J. Trump’s<br />election in November, it looked as if the world economy might be getting jolted out of that cycle.<br />But absent something surprising, it looks as if the most likely course is a lengthy grinding process: The global demand for goods<br />and services slowly rises until the supply glut gradually gives way to tighter labor markets, and the world economy becomes constrained by its industrial capacity.<br />In the United States, a key inflation measure favored by the Federal Reserve passed over that 2 percent level for the first time in five years.
