The Great Inflation

Everything is Great nowadays.  Or Huge, depending upon your pop-culture or presidential superlatives.  The pricing of stuff is always huge.  We like our asset prices to go up but not our expenses.  When both go up, that is inflation.  Inflation is not a superlative.  Inflation is undesirable to a point.  Inflation is always and everywhere possible, even nowadays.  After the greatest quantitative easing ever was conducted by the Federal Reserve to battle the Great Recession, now with so much money in the system, quantitative tightening will be the greatest counter-measure ever conducted by the Fed.  Inflation will be a fear going forward.  There were points in history when such sustained general price increases lead to awful economic conditions like malaises, panics and crashes.  Four separate periods of double-digit inflation happened between 1775 and 1913 the United States.  The big-one or the Great Inflation took place between 1965 and 1982.  Three painful recessions took place during this period including ruinous Stagflation.  American macroeconomic policy got gob-smacked from these events.  Ever since, the Great Inflation has been the most dreaded of repeatable economic developments.  Potentially used as a prescient tool for today’s conditions, Michael Bryan of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta wrote the best short monograph on the subject.  One most informed should read more.