HMT Inflation Seminar Series 2023
Inflation in the 1970s
Dr Duncan Needham (University of Cambridge)
Thursday 19 April 2023
All developed nations experienced higher inflation in the mid-1970s. However, with the Retail Price Index rising by 26.9 per cent in the year to August 1975, Britain experienced the highest. There were three principal drivers of higher British inflation: loose fiscal policy (Ted Heath’s 1972-73 ‘dash-for-growth’), loose monetary policy (the Competition and Credit Control reform of 1971), and a misguided incomes policy (the ‘threshold agreements’ that indexed wages to inflation prior to the 1973 oil shock). In this talk, Duncan Needham provides the context for each of these policies, outline some of the political and economic consequences, and draw comparisons with today’s inflationary environment.
The US way out of the Great Depression
Dr Natacha Postel-Vinay (LSE)
Wednesday 31 May 2023
How did the US get out of the Great Depression? In 1933, the US was facing its highest debt-to-GDP ratio in a century while at the same time having to battle its deepest recession. Franklin D. Roosevelt, freshly elected in March 1933, had to make tough policy choices. In this talk, Dr Natacha Postel-Vinay will explore both the monetary and the fiscal side of those decisions. It will be seen that, although the monetary decisions are fairly well known, the fiscal New Deal has often been misunderstood and misrepresented. Their respective impacts are still under debate to this day.
The cost of breaking inflationary expectations in the 1980s
Professor Catherine Schenk (University of Oxford)
Thursday 29 June 2023
The inflationary environment of the late 1970s posed fresh challenges to the Keynesian consensus built on an understanding of the trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Inflationary expectations as well as cost-push factors became the focus of economic theorists and policy-makers. Ultimately, policy innovation by the Federal Reserve in 1979, introduced by Fed Chair Paul Volcker, was widely credited with breaking the inflationary spiral not just in the USA but in the rest of the world. This seminar will focus on the role of the US dollar in the international monetary system and the global effects of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy in the 1980s, when inflation was beaten but the cost to growth and financial stability was substantial. This episode emphasises the importance of anticipating the spill-over effects of tighter monetary policy on financial stability.
Inflation in the early 1950s
William Allen (NIESR)
Wednesday 29 November 2023
Abstract to follow