Austan Goolsbee
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And they very well could both drive up prices and down employment at the same time.
It's important to remember that a stagflationary direction shock is not the same thing as stagflation.
And I like to run the mental experiment.
Say you back to the future style, you could call
people from 1978 and say, hey, we're having stagflation.
What should we do?
You know, you're dealing with stagflation.
And the first thing they'd say is, what's your unemployment rate?
And you'd be like, well, it's 4.3%.
What?
4.3%.
What's your inflation rate?
Well, you know, we're disturbed.
It's a little over 3%.
I mean, they had periods where the unemployment rate was pushing 10% and inflation is over 10%.
We have the tiniest violin.
We're not there.
We're not even close to there.
Let us never get there.
But that still doesn't make it any easier to deal with stuff that's pushing that way.