“I find the fixation on 1970s inflation puzzling,” the New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum wrote this past May on Twitter. “I mean really,” he continued, “of all the things that were terrible about the 1970s how is [it] that inflation is the one thing the Boomers have really devoted their lifetimes to preventing?”
The 5.4 percent annualized increase in the Consumer Price Index in June—and a 0.9 percent over May, the highest one-month jump since June 2008—was the lead story in the dead-tree edition of Appelbaum’s newspaper on July 14. It was a sound news decision. The Federal Reserve doesn’t like to see the annual CPI rise much above 2 percent, and we civilians get a little squirrelly when it rises above 4 percent.
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