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Originally Posted by Highwayman  He inherited it from Carter. Record gas prices, double digit mortgage rates and all. |
Oh come on, you're older than I am. I was just coming of age back then and was still in college (and a republican) during Carter's presidency.
The period covering the run up to the post Vietnam through the Ford and Carter terms and into the first two years of the Reagan presidency were periods of some of the highest inflation this country had ever seen. (Remember Ford's WIN buttons?). What was perverse about that period was the the conventional economic wisdom (Keynes) held that in period of high unemployment there would be low inflation and vice versa. Unfortunately the country had both.
It the Fed Chairman (a Carter appointee who was kept on until 1987 or so by the Reagan camp) that created what the Wall Street Journal this week called "the country's worse recession since the great depression" during the early part of Reagan's term in order to tame inflation. Reagan didn't inherit a recession, and to be fair, he didn't necessarily create it either but it happened on his watch.
(The article was in an analysis of the issues facing the next president and is a pay site but if you (or others) want to read it, send me an email address and I can send you a copy.)
I still have the closing papers on the first house I ever bought in 1982, with a special "below market" rate of 13.52%.
