This book explores why inflation surged globally in the 2020s, where we are heading and what lessons we can draw from it. Following a decade of too-low inflation, inflation suddenly surged in 2021–22 to its highest levels in 40 years in the US and Europe. The book introduces a simple economic framework and adopts a global perspective to compare the inflation experiences across the US, Europe, and Asia. Among the key questions the authors tackle is 1) why the West suddenly experienced surging inflation when their central banks had been fighting too-low inflation in the 2010s, 2) why so few economists saw the inflation resurgence coming, and 3) why China now faces deflation.
The great inflation resurgence has taught us several key lessons, namely that inflation is a global phenomenon with local characteristics, that economists should rely more on broad economic thinking, and less on models when large shocks occur, and finally that fiscal policy is a major differentiator. The authors, a central banker and an economist on the ‘buy side’, offer key lessons for both central banks and financial markets while anticipating where inflation might be headed.