Are Inflation Hawks Just Chicken Littles In A Suit?
James Surowiecki at The New Yorker delves into the mindset of inflation hawks. He notes that no matter what official readings say, and no matter how sluggish the economy is, the hawks are always worried about the exact same thing: …there’s something peculiar about how powerful fears of inflation are. In the past ninety years, the U.S. has had only one sustained bout with high inflation—in the seventies. That track record should engender some faith that central bankers are going to be responsible, and that a healthy industrial economy isn’t prone to regular inflationary spirals. It hasn’t. Instead, we’re always about to relive 1974 all over again, which is why last year, as oil prices rose, we were bombarded with references to “stagflation.” In a way, there’s something profoundly puritanical, in the original sense of that word, about the inflation hawks: we are always on the verge of sinning, always about to succumb to our worst impulses. Even the rhetoric of inflation—the “debasement
