Mark Lister

So it wasn't a bad environment at all.

The 60s were a good decade for the US economy.

But fast forward to 1974, and inflation had surged to 10%.

The central bank policy interest rate was almost 13%.

Unemployment had risen from in the threes to almost 9%.

and the US economy was in recession.

So it was a really tough time for everybody, including investors.

I guess if you were lucky enough to have money to invest at that time, you were doing better than most.

But it was a really challenging time, the 1970s.

Here in New Zealand, we suffered a similar fate, but we were already hurting from falling wool prices and a sharp devaluation in the Kiwi dollar.

Remember back in those days it wasn't floated, it was sort of government controlled, so they chose to devalue it when they thought they needed to, and we'd just seen a big devaluation.

That had made imported fuel even more expensive.

And on top of that, we had to contend with our major export market of the time, which was Britain,

joining the European Economic Community.

That happened in 1973.

And that effectively excluded us from the British market, which was our biggest export market at the time.

So our share of exports that went to Britain fell from 43% in 1960 to less than 15%, which is a massive change over 20 years, from 43% to under 15%.

Now, to be clear, the 1970s were a really unique period and we are a long, long way from that today despite fuel prices that have been much higher and despite fears that we will potentially see a broader inflation spike.

However, the current situation definitely bears monitoring.

We do have to keep an eye on this.