The Deflationary Economy

Today we’re talking about the deflationary impact of an oil shock.

Now that might sound counterintuitive at first. After all, if oil prices spike, and if shortages appear in oil, aluminum, fertilizer, natural gas, and other key industrial inputs, most people’s first instinct is to call that inflationary. And at the consumer level, it certainly feels inflationary. You see it at the pump. You see it in groceries. You see it in utility bills. You see it in transportation and construction costs.

But that’s only the first-order effect.

The deeper question is this: what does a commodity shock do to the broader economy?

History gives us a fairly consistent answer. Oil shocks are not ultimately expansionary. They are contractionary. They are not the fuel for growth. They are the tax that crushes growth. In the 1970’s we called it stagflation.

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