Wednesday, October 7, 2015

The Arthurian — Inflation and Oil


Evidence that rising oil price was not the chief factor in rising inflation in the 60s and 70s (Vietnam era).

The New Arthurian Economics
Inflation and Oil
The Arthurian

3 comments:

John said...

David Harvey puts it down to a real estate crash and banking crisis, and nothing to do with oil. I'd like to see more evidence, but it seems very plausible.

Dan Lynch said...

Nah, his graph is trying to compare apples and oranges. Look at this graph instead, where both oil and price levels are shown as % change from a year ago. Definitely a correlation.

Dan Lynch said...

In his comment Arthur says something about inflation in Q2 1961. Ummmm ..... CPI was 1.2% in Q2 1961. I'm not getting his point?
.
That said, prior to OPEC, inflation was largely influenced by employment (which is probably a reflection of how close the economy is to capacity). So in the 60's what little inflation existed was driven by employment/capacity. See this chart.