Opinion: What happened the last time the economy emerged from a pandemic?
Retirees should continue betting that inflation’s recent spike will be transitory.
I concede that this is getting harder to do, however. I first made this argument two months ago in response to the report that April’s Consumer Price Index’s 12-month rate of change was the highest in 13 years. Since then the CPI has risen even more, and its latest 12-month rate of change is now higher than it was then.
For this column I’m adding an additional perspective to the arguments I advanced then. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been included in the myriad discussions that have taken place up until now.
Read: Planning for retirement? You should also plan for inflation
This additional perspective comes from analyzing how inflation responded a century ago when the Spanish-flu pandemic came to an end. This history is relevant, since Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell this week argued that…
