Posted By RichC on January 5, 2020
An interesting take on “inflation” and how different generations perceive the possibility of it accelerating in the next decade or so … and perhaps the effect it can or will have on our lives. For example, in the graph below, pick your birth year and note the color bars to determine how many years of 0 to 6% inflation per year. Interesting.
For millennials in Generation “Z” and “X,” hardly remembers inflation or is concerned just how painful high inflation can be. They can’t relate to double-digit home loans or borrowing for cars at credit card rates. The boomers often recall the pain and difficulty in planning one year to another with inflation running nearly 10% each year in the 1970s and 80s.
Some of use who grew up with this as a “normal concern,” anxiously look at the economy through the skewed lenses of inflation … even when there hasn’t been any for years (or very much). Instead of watching the Federal Reserve flit back and forth with rates in the very low digits as it has for a couple decades, 
the late Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker jacked rates up to nearly 20% and kept them high for a long period of time in order to stop inflation. I remember thinking, “Hm, if I could save enough to buy a few 30 year Treasuries yielding 10%, I could live off that interest.”
But it did not continue and as a result we now have a generation that has never truly felt the impact of inflation. As a Washington Post article commented last month, Volcker “not only broke inflation’s back but seemed to cripple it forever.”
Today’s workforce barely remembers Volcker’s titanic showdown with rising prices. Fewer than a quarter of today’s working-age Americans were over age 18 at the time — and they’re all baby boomers.
“There’s a generation of both people and economic analysts who never experienced the monster that Volcker slayed,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who served as chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden.
Overall, 6 in 10 working-age Americans haven’t even seen inflation above 4 percent. A quarter of them haven’t even seen a sustained stretch above 3 percent.
(more…)
Category: Business, Financial, History, News |
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Tags: economy, gen x, gen z, generation, inflation, interest rates, washington post
as invincible to injury as he thinks? (he said to me, “oh, I’ve done this before”) 
