In the first Superman movie, released in 1978, Lex Luthor, the supervillain played by Gene Hackman, buys up large swaths of real estate in the deserts of eastern California and Nevada. His plan is to hijack a nuclear missile and use it to cleave off coastal California into the Pacific Ocean, leaving him with newly valuable beach-front property. Well, maybe all Lex really needed was patience, not a nuclear device...

Monetary policymakers always worry about inflation expectations. They can’t directly observe what households and business anticipate for the future path of prices, so they construct estimates from market prices and surveys. Why do they care so much? The reason is simple: keeping inflation expectations low and stable is the first step to keeping inflation low and stable. It also makes the economy more resilient in the face of adverse shocks...