Musicmaker : Will it continue? My dad once told me, nearly 40 years ago, long after I was an adult, "I'm sorry, you've never experienced a year without inflation." He was born 100 years ago this year, and when he was young you bought a house and it went down in value, like a car or anything else.
@Blackbird :
www.npr.org/2022/02/ 13/1080464204/this-i s-what-was-happening -40-years-ago-t
The last time inflation was this high, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Olivia Newton-John was all over the radio, and the cool new computer was the Commodore 64, named for its 64 kilobytes of memory. Oh, and there was a new soft drink about to hit the shelves.
RONALD REAGAN: Now, we've just had two years of back-to-back double-digit inflation - 13.3% in 1979, 12.4% last year. The last time this happened was in World War I.
HORSLEY: So by the standards of the '70s and early '80s, today's inflation rate actually doesn't look that bad.
SNELL: So it was coming down. How did policymakers get control of inflation back then?
HORSLEY: Well, it was pretty painful medicine delivered by the Federal Reserve. Paul Volcker, who was appointed Fed chairman by then President Carter, was determined to break the back of inflation, and he was willing to push interest rates sky high to do it. To give you an example, in 1981, mortgage rates soared to 18%. As you can imagine, that was pretty unpopular. Angry homebuilders scrawled protest notes to Volcker on the backs of wooden planks. But the Fed chairman stuck to his guns.