In simplest terms, stagflation is inflation + recession... at the same time! 

"That's impossible," claimed Keynesian theorists who in the 1970s comprised the dominant force in economic theory and practice. According to Keynes, recessions are solved by one thing: inflation. But what, according to Keynes, solves inflation? One thing:  recession.

In a brief period during the 1970s the United States economy experienced simultaneous inflation and high unemployment. The confluence of events leading up to this developed like a perfect storm.  

First, the U.S. was at war in Vietnam, and because wars are expensive and require public financing, money supply was increased. As one would expect, the increase in dollars (the supply of money) led to inflation. 

In fact, inflation became so entrenched during the 1970s that people began to anticipate higher prices and therefore did something any rational actor would do: they purchased more goods ahead of time, increasing demand.

Toss in the 1973 Oil Embargo, the collapse of Bretton Woods, and the U.S. economy experienced a perfect storm of inflation and slowing growth.  Many people think of Bretton Woods as The Gold Standard. But the difference between the Bretton Woods Agreement and a "real gold standard" with fixed parity, is that under Bretton Woods, while currencies were convertible into gold, countries retained the right to change par values. Keynes actually described Bretton Woods as the opposite of the gold standard.

Anyway, as these factors circulated and combined, the result for the U.S. was very high inflation expectations combined with diminished output, high inflation and very high interest rates.


3. Enter, The Monetarists

The best known of all Monetarists was Milton Friedman, of course, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976 "for his achievement in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy."

In Friedman's book, Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960, he popularized the monetarist mantra that, "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." Therefore, according to Friedman, the "trick" to maintaining an acceptable rate of inflation was simply for the central bank to closely monitor the economy and use central bank policy tools to keep the supply and demand for money at equilibrium.

Monetarists, as you can see, have no problem with fiat currency. Instead, monetarists view an artificial inflation of the money supply as "ok" as long as it does not become excessive.  In other words, pumping up the money supply is fine, as long as you do it slowly... perhaps so slowly that people don't notice. 

Thanks to stagflation, The Monetarist school of thought, and Friedman in particular, developed the "Expectations-Augmented Phillips Curve."

Professor A.W. Phillips "discovered" the Phillips Curve, which, ahem, "simply" shows the relationship between unemployment and inflation.

Phillips found that there appeared to be a necessary and fixed trade-off between unemployment and inflation. Any attempt by a government to reduce unemployment would lead to increased inflation. Keynesian's loved this, of course... until stagflation arrived, breaking the unemployment-inflation relationship.

Friedman, in order to "save" the Phillips Curve, showed how it could be "adapted" to inflation expectations.

President Reagan's economic policy (which many attribute to the successful conclusion of the stagflation and/or inflation of the 1970s) is often equated with supply-side economics and a true "free-market" spirit.  However, economic policy under the Reagan administration was clearly only partially grounded in true supply-side theory and Frank Shostak argued several years ago that supply-side economics is not really a free market approach at all: 

"In fact, they are very much like the rest of mainstream economics. While mainstream economists advocate the management of demand, supply-siders advocate the management of supply." he wrote.  "In the free-market economy, neither demand nor supply is managed. Both consumption and production are equally important in the fulfillment of people's ultimate goal, which is the maintenance of life and well-being. In short, consumption is dependent on production, while production is dependent on consumption. The loose monetary policy of the central bank breaks this unity by creating an environment where it appears that it is possible to consume without production. This unity can be restored by bringing back the market-selected money: gold."


5. Not Your Father's Stagflation

So where are we today? Is this the return of stagflation? Are "inflation expectations" creeping higher? 

Yesterday's release of the Producer Price Index showed a year-over-year increase of 9.8% in the headline number while the core year-over-year rate, which excludes food and energy, edged higher to 3.5%. 

Combined with housing deflation, stagnant wages and increasing concern that employment is doomed to edge higher, the word "stagflation" is increasingly making the rounds.  

As the 70s proved, an increase in inflation expectations can produce a cycle of demand that feeds on itself, despite rising unemployment and slower growth. But there are critical differences that exist today. This is most decidedly not our fathers' stagflation. 

In 2006 when I first wrote about Stagflation I asked the following questions: 

• What if the familiar 1970s cycle of increasing inflation expectations doesn't repeat itself because of where we are in the credit-cycle? 
• What if there is no longer the same appetite for credit expansion now as there was between 1980 and 2005?
• What if the consumer no longer has the same appetite for risk? 
• What if the consumer is in cut back mode in response to even the slightest whiff of inflation; i.e. food and energy? 

The answer was that if any of those conditions are present, then what may look like Stagflation now will simply be the transition between excessive risk-seeking behavior, a seemingly endless appetite for credit, and a correction to the Federal Reserve's long-term credit expansion. 

In 2006 the view as that as long as appetites for credit remained healthy, we can continue to happily teeter between inflation and stagflation. Today, there is no question that appetite for credit has diminished in virtual lockstep with debt destruction and less credit availablity overall. 

After more than two decades of credit expansion the limits have been met. The debt in the economy is no longer sustainable without an expansion of credit and we are now seeing reductions in lending, reductions in spending and reductions in production, all of which are conspiring to slow the velocity of money necessary to sustain economic growth. The Federal Reserve's ability to "engineer" the economy out of deflation is entirely dependent on expanding appetites for credit, an increase in the velocity of money. 

A general decline in the ability and, more importantly, the desire to lend and borrow acts is showing up virtually everywhere we look. The Fed's Senior Loan Officer Survey, which has been tracking tightening lending standards for residential mortgages and even commercial lending, found that 60% of domestic banks expected to tighten standards on credit-card loans in the second half of the year. That's really the final straw in the consumer's back.

So, the government should do something, right?

Ironically, government intervention and regulation, everything from splitting up the bond insurers, enforcing penalties against banks such as Citigroup (C), JP Morgan (JPM) and Wachovia (WB) for backing away from the auction-rate securities markets, nationalizing Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), and by extension the entire U.S. real estate market, will have the perverse effect of further slowing the velocity of money. 

That is bad news for the Federal Reserve because at the end of the day it doesn't matter how much credit is made available; it matters how many people are willing to take it, and how quickly it circulates throughout the economy. Stagflation is simply the transition from credit expansion to credit contraction, leading inevitably to deflation.