Archive Report
Archive Report
Debate Over Ways to Combat Inflation
Talk About Wage, Price and Credit Controls
Talk among economists is turning to the possibility that the federal government will have to invoke wartime controls over wages, prices, rents, bank lending and so on. The talk is stimulated by the inability of monetary and fiscal restraints thus far in 1969 to halt the nation's worst inflation in two decades. “If by the year-end the inflationary spiral shows no sign of responding to general monetary-fiscal restraint,” the monthly Economic Letter of the Cleveland Central National Bank observed in June, “new approaches will have to be considered, and direct controls is one method that has worked in the past.”
A Gallup Poll published in early July indicated that the American public was inclined ...