In the European Union, where joblessness typically runs higher, Zandi’s threshold is different: 9% unemployment and 4% year-over-year inflation, in his view, would combine to cause stagflation. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has his own rough guide: Stagflation arrives in the United States, he says, when the unemployment rate reaches at least 5% and consumer prices have surged 5% or more from a year earlier. There’s no formal definition or specific statistical threshold. So there should be a period in the next year or two where growth is low, unemployment is at least up a little bit and inflation is still high.”Īnd then Bernanke summed up his thoughts: “You could call that stagflation.” The widespread fear, reflected in shrunken stock prices, is that the Fed will end up botching it and will clobber the economy without delivering a knockout blow to inflation.įormer Fed Chair Ben Bernanke last month told The New York Times that “inflation’s still too high but coming down. They hope to cool growth enough to tame inflation without causing a recession. The Federal Reserve and other central banks, blindsided by raging inflation, are scrambling to catch up by aggressively raising interest rates. Supply chain bottlenecks and disruptions from Russia’s war against Ukraine have sent consumer prices surging at their fastest pace in decades. economy has enough oomph to avoid a recession. But the drop was due mostly to two factors that don’t reflect the economy’s underlying strength: A rising trade gap caused by Americans’ appetite for foreign products and a slowdown in the restocking of businesses inventories after a big holiday season buildup.įor now, economists broadly agree that the U.S. The government estimates that the economy shrank at a 1.5% annual rate from January through March. “The economic outlook globally,” Yellen said, “is challenging and uncertain, and higher food and energy prices are having stagflationary effects, namely depressing output and spending and raising inflation all around the world.”
… It’s a phenomenon - stagflation - that the world has not seen since the 1970s.’’Īnd last month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen invoked the word in remarks to reporters: “This time, it is facing high inflation and slow growth at the same time. “The world economy is again in danger,” the anti-poverty agency warned. This week, the World Bank raised the specter of stagflation in sharply downgrading its outlook for the global economy. But as a longer-term threat, it can no longer be dismissed. They’d long assumed that inflation would run high only when the economy was strong and unemployment low.īut an unhappy confluence of events has economists reaching back to the days of disco and the bleak high-inflation, high-unemployment economy of nearly a half century ago. Stagflation is the bitterest of economic pills: High inflation mixes with a weak job market to cause a toxic brew that punishes consumers and befuddles economists.įor decades, most economists didn’t think such a nasty concoction was even possible.
It was the dreaded “S word” of the 1970s.įor Americans of a certain age, it conjures memories of painfully long lines at gas stations, shuttered factories and President Gerald Ford’s much-ridiculed “Whip Inflation Now” buttons.
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