WSJ cliffhangers, who doesn't love 'em. I'm too young to remember the financial markets of the eighties and nineties. Suppose each year inflation goes up by one percent the next five years - what happens? Is this an economic crisis incubator? Or mostly an investor problem that'll destroy dwindling pensions even further?But it would be crazy to build a portfolio that didn’t consider inflation a major risk. I’ll address the question of how to do that in a column soon.
What you really wanna wrap your head around is the Nixon Shock And the Volcker Shock There's a Canadian economist whose name escapes me who argued that interest rates are the price of monopoly. The easier it is to borrow money, the easier it is to buy out your competitors. An increase in inflation should lead to an increase in interest rates, but as demonstrated in the dying light of The Before Time, the Fed has sort of lost the ability to control interest rates: I dunno what the hell happens. Maybe nothing maybe lots. As Galbraith said, and Rumsfeld butchered, "there are two kinds of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know." I'll say this: DOGE doesn't go to 70 cents if /r/WSB and their ilk don't discover the grift when RobinHood halts trading in GME. WeWork doesn't have a $47b valuation in a world where a passbook savings account makes 4%. And for purposes of tariff avoidance and tax evasion, crypto matters.The Nixon Shock has been widely considered to be a political success, but an economic mixed bag in bringing on the stagflation of the 1970s and leading to the instability of floating currencies. The dollar plunged by a third during the 1970s.
US inflation, which peaked at 14.8 percent in March 1980, fell below 3 percent by 1983. The Federal Reserve board led by Volcker raised the federal funds rate, which had averaged 11.2% in 1979, to a peak of 20% in June 1981. The prime rate rose to 21.5% in 1981 as well, which helped lead to the 1980–1982 recession, in which the national unemployment rate rose to over 10%.
