Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

This book is about the NEXT financial crisis. A crisis, that - according to the author - will result from an unexpected return of high inflation and rising interest rates. The author explains the risks of such an event, describes analogies from the past, and offers numerous paradigms, concepts, and ideas that may help companies and individuals to turn inflation risks into opportunities. Dr. Hammes was one of the first experts who foresaw the last financial crisis. As early as 2000, Dr. Hammes warned publicly that a major financial crisis was unavoidable if risk management deficiencies in the financial industry remained unaddressed. In his new book, Dr. Hammes warns of an even more serious crisis caused by an unprecedented state of collective unpreparedness regarding inflation risks. A return of high inflation to the developed world should not surprise us. Judging from historical analogies, inflation is a likely outcome of the economic malaise we are in and the policies we have chosen. Irresponsible fiscal behavior, excessive levels of government and private sector debt, and ultra-loose monetary policies are very likely to be followed by a period of excessive inflation. While we cannot exactly time the occurrence of such an inflation risk event, we can quite well assess its general probability of occurrence. The vast majority of companies and individuals are not prepared to deal with a return of high inflation. We are in a state of collective unpreparedness. Also, there is very little practical research out there that could help managers and individuals prepare for such a risk event. Even worse, our modern economic and financial systems and processes in the developed world are based on the assumption of low inflation. They have never been stress-tested for a different scenario. Inflation management requires a different set of skills than those taught to us in western business schools. Reading this book should be the start of an important journey to better understand the risks of high inflation and how they impact your company and your personal life. Maybe the journey will take you one step further and enable you to turn inflation risks into a big opportunity as some best practice examples did during past inflation periods. We are now at a stage in history when the economic, fiscal, financial, and social situation in many developed countries resembles terrifying parallels to past periods of history prior to major outbreaks of high inflation. At the moment, a wide range of inflation strategies is available to companies and individuals who take inflation risks seriously. Many of these ideas and concepts are discussed in this book. Therefore, the author's recommendation is simple: prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Do not base important risk management strategies on hope and gamble that everything will be fine. The price for being wrong is extremely high when it comes to inflation risks.

Why we need to heed the lessons of high inflation Today's global economy, with most developed nations experiencing very low inflation, seems a world apart from the "Great Inflation" that spanned the late 1960s to early 1980s. Yet, in this book, Brigitte Granville makes the case that monetary economists and policymakers need to keep the lessons learned during that period very much in mind, lest we return to them by making the same mistakes we made in the past. Granville details the advances in macroeconomic thinking that gave rise to the "Great Moderation"—a period of stable inflation and economic growth, which lasted from the mid-1980s through the most recent financial crisis. She makes the case that the central banks' management of monetary policy—hinging on expectations and credibility—brought about this period of stability, and traces the roots of this success back to the eighteenth-century foundations of modern monetary thought. Tackling fundamental questions such as the causes of inflation and its relation to unemployment and growth, the natural rate of inflation hypothesis, the fiscal theory of the price level, and the proper goals of central banks, the book aims above all to demonstrate the dangers of forgetting the role of credibility in establishing sound monetary policy. With the lessons of the past firmly in mind, Granville presents stimulating ideas and proposals about inflation-targeting principles, which provide tools for present-day monetary authorities dealing with the forces of globalization, mercantilism, and reserve accumulation.

While there is ample evidence that high inflation is harmful, little is known about how best to reduce inflation or how far it should be reduced. In this volume, sixteen distinguished economists analyze the appropriateness of low inflation as a goal for monetary policy and discuss possible strategies for reducing inflation. Section I discusses the consequences of inflation. These papers analyze inflation's impact on the tax system, labor market flexibility, equilibrium unemployment, and the public's sense of well-being. Section II considers the obstacles facing central bankers in achieving low inflation. These papers study the precision of estimates of equilibrium unemployment, the sources of the high inflation of the 1970s, and the use of non-traditional indicators in policy formation. The papers in section III consider how institutions can be designed to promote successful monetary policy, and the importance of institutions to the performance of policy in the United States, Germany, and other countries. This timely volume should be read by anyone who studies or conducts monetary policy.

In Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Mark Blyth, a renowned scholar of political economy, provides a powerful and trenchant account of the shift toward austerity policies by governments throughout the world since 2009. The issue is at the crux about how to emerge from the Great Recession, and will drive the debate for the foreseeable future.