Answering the great inflation question of our time
Prices of everything; a house in Phoenix, a Ford F-150, a plane ticket to New York, have all gone up. That much is true.Unfortunately pretty much everything else about inflation—a red hot topic these days—is conjecture. And that’s vexing, not just for the dismal scientists (aka economists), but for all of us, because whether or not prices are really rising, by how much and for how long, has massive implications in our lives. Or as Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, says: “Inflation is one of the mysteries of economic study and thought. A difficult thing to gauge and forecast and get right. That’s why the risks are high.”The current debate over inflation really revolves around two questions: First, is this current spate of inflation, just that, a spate—or to use Wall Street’s