"From investors and monetary authorities to governments and policy makers, almost everyone had assumed inflation was dead and buried. But now people the world over are confronting a poisonous new economic reality and, with it, the prospect of vast and increasing wealth inequality. How have we arrived in this situation? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Celebrated economist Stephen D. King--one of the few to warn ahead of time about the latest...

The Great Inflation, argues journalist Samuelson, was the worst domestic policy blunder of the postwar era and played a crucial role in transforming American politics, economy, and everyday life--and yet its story is hardly remembered or appreciated. From 1960 to 1979, inflation rose from barely more than 1 percent to nearly 14 percent--the greatest peacetime inflationary spike in this nation's history. It had massive repercussions in every area of...

"How inflation fears shaped American society, then and now. For most of its history, the United States has benefited from price stability-a steady relationship between supply and demand, characterized by prices that don't inflate or deflate in unpredictable fashion. Across these long stretches, the US economy became famously free-market: prices did the job of stabilizing the economy so the government didn't have to. In this sweeping and revelatory...