If PepsiCo faced tough competition, it could never have gotten away with this. But it doesn’t. To the contrary, it appears to have colluded with Coca-Cola – which, oddly, announced price increases at about the same time as PepsiCo, and has increased its profit margins to 28.9%. Normally I would enjoy any book on monetary policy, but I found this book to be very poorly structured, jumping around in time, pushing an Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton analogy too far (when it would have been far simpler to just talk directly about the relationship between fiscal and monetary policy - the points would have been more easily grasped).

Boeing and McDonnell Douglas have merged, leaving the US with just one large producer of civilian aircraft: Boeing.Most of those who have to deal with inflation are too young to remember when it was last a serious issue. This book teaches them what they need to know. King’s lessons command our attention.”—Lawrence H. Summers, former US Treasury Secretary

it makes economic planning incredibly difficult, causing people to invest time in thinking about inflation to the detriment of more productive activities,

Not just a useful and well-written account of inflation for the layman, but a contribution to a debate that is still very much live. A brilliantly clear and concise new history.”—Juliet Samuel, Times (UK) it leads to extreme redistributions of wealth that are rightly perceived as arbitrary and unfair, and

Some valuable points on MPC decision making at times of uncertainty- but all the really valuable insights in this book (& there are many) get drowned out by it’s less than optimal structure. Celebrated economist Stephen D. King—one of the few to warn ahead of time about the latest inflationary upheaval—identifies key lessons from the history of inflation that policy makers chose not to heed. From ancient Rome through the American Civil War and up to the asset bubbles of today, inflation stems from policy error, sovereign greed, and a collective loss of faith in currencies. Stephen Kind suggests four tests to determine whether inflation is persistent (these are, arguably, retrofitted):Airlines have merged from 12 in 1980 to four today, which now control 80% of domestic seating capacity. Have there been institutional changes suggesting an increased bias in favour of inflation? King argues that central banks’ bias against deflation during the past decade may have created a bias in favour of inflation. Quantitative easing also removed an early indicator of inflation. That is your right. But you'd be advised to read this book first."-Stephanie Flanders From investors and monetary authorities to governments and policy makers, almost everyone had assumed inflation was dead and buried. How will the consumer react as the cost of living ratchets up? Right now, we don't know. It's been a very long time since there has been a comparable situation. We need our collective ears to the ground on this matter more than any other. A book cannot do everything, though, and this one was written as the inflationary picture was continually evolving. Overall, it is the best book on the market for using this moment to deliver lessons in history and advice to policymakers. It somehow remains both broad and deep, explaining the perils of ever thinking that inflation is whipped right through to analyzing what went wrong with former UK prime minister Liz Truss’s infamous mini‐​budget.

How might monetary policymakers better assess whether inflationary pressures are likely to be more persistent in the future? King posits four “tests” that they should consider. If the answers to the questions are “yes,” then our monetary overlords should be alive to the threat of ongoing elevated inflation. The implicit critique is that, by failing to consider these questions this time, central bankers were asleep at the wheel, allowing aggregate demand to outstrip supply. My kind of inflation book. There is lots of great storytelling, which lightens the subject matter, and makes it accessible to non-experts.”—Moira O’Neill, Financial Times, “Best Summer Books of 2023: Money”A FINANCIAL TIMES "BOOK TO READ IN 2023" "Everything you wanted to know about inflation but were afraid to ask."-Mervyn King "King's lessons command our attention."-Lawrence H. King also is clearly correct that both supply‐​side and demand‐​side factors have driven the surge in the price level since 2021. Yet, one downside of his not outlining his own “model” of the economy is the failure to define his own preferred monetary rule and so make ajudgment on what actions central banks should have taken and when. He admits that in periods like what we’ve lived through, “policymakers are not easily able to distinguish inflationary squalls from periods of inflationary persistence.” That is true, but it is difficult to square with his justified criticism of the complacency of the economic establishment in letting the inflation genie out of the bottle of late. Test 1: Have there been institutional changes that would suggest an increased bias in favor of inflation? Unfortunately, by 2021, the answer was yes. The Fed’s move in 2020 to an average inflation targeting regime is one example. It created adynamic in favor of above‐​target inflation, King argues, because the public knew that central bankers would be less likely to react to big overshoots in inflation with big undershoots that risked about of much‐​feared deflation. The use of quantitative easing (QE) for over adecade, too, put downward pressure on bond yields, eroding the value of freely moving bond prices as an indicator of inflationary pressures. And central bank independence paradoxically made the monetary authorities less willing to spell out the inflationary consequences of large amounts of government borrowing when inflation started rising significantly; musing on this would be seen as too political. A damning critique. . . . King writes lucidly, avoiding the jargon that makes economics impenetrable to the lay reader.”—Edward Chancellor, Times Literary Supplement