#1150 Mark Blyth - Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers

Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The De Center. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by a return guest, Dr. Mark Blythe, William R. Rhodes, Professor of International Economics at Bron University. And today we're talking about his latest book, Inflation, A Guide for Users. And losers. So Doctor Blyf, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to have you one. It's great to be back with you. Okay, so I mean, why did you decide to write a book on inflation? What motivated you to do so? Uh it wasn't the inflation itself.

So We recall that we had this inflationary burst across the world from twenty one to twenty four, essentially. And I had a postdoc at the time, my co author Nicole Fracarol, and he walked into my office and said, We should do a book on inflation. I said, Well why don't we understand this? It's always and everywhere a monetary phenomena, blah blah blah. And he said, Yes, but it's a bit like austerity and we had both written books on austerity in the austerity period.

And I said, What do you mean? He says, Well, it's a bit like monetary austerity. I mean ultimately who gets uh who gets the short end of the stick when you raise interest rates. Um, people who are g become unemployed. Who's that? It's people in the bottom end of the skill and income distribution. Uh who makes out quite well from inflation, people who hold assets that are inflation resistant, like housing, uh, people who have stocks and bonds and companies that do well from inflation. So there's a whole distributional story here. But we don't really appreciate it. So we' hence we s hope focused on this thing of users and losers. Second thing was it was quite interesting. Um, I was raised in the lost inflation. I was on the tail end of it. I mean, it was the seventies into the eighties, and I kind of came of age in the nineteen eighties.

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