The gas lines are gone. The leisure suits are history. But the forces that brought America to its knees in the 1970s - runaway inflation, stagnant growth, political paralysis, and a Federal Reserve caught between its mandate and its masters - are back. And this time, the debt is thirty-five trillion dollars deeper.
Déjà Vu: Stagflation traces the full arc of America's most turbulent economic decade and holds it against the mirror of today. From Nixon's fateful decision to close the gold window in 1971, to the OPEC oil embargo that turned a monetary problem into a national crisis, to Paul Volcker's brutal cure that broke inflation's back at the cost of double-digit unemployment - this book tells the complete story of how the world's most powerful economy lost control, and what it took to get it back.
Then it asks the uncomfortable question: Are we there again?
With $35 trillion in national debt, a Federal Reserve balance sheet swollen to nine trillion dollars, supply chains that proved fragile overnight, and a political system too polarized to impose the discipline the situation demands, the structural conditions for a new stagflationary era are not hypothetical. They are present. They are measurable. And history suggests we are running out of time to address them before the market does it for us.
This is not a book of predictions. It is a book of patterns - and the pattern is familiar enough to demand attention from every American who earns a wage, holds savings, or wonders why the future feels harder to reach than it used to.
