Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times

The inflation of the past three years has been devastating for households and businesses running on small margins. It's all the more frustrating that during those years, we kept being told that it is transitory, softening, calming, cooling, settling down, and essentially not much of a problem anymore. We look back and know now that it was never true.

In reality, three years is a very short time for a major currency to lose at least a quarter of its domestic purchasing power. In the postwar period, it took from the war's end until 1965 for that to happen. This was also the loss from 1982 to 1992, from 1992 to 2000, and from 2001 to 2012.

That's hardly a record of stable money, but it is manageable, from the standpoint of accounting and psychology. We were used to it.

What's happened to the dollar over the past three years is a more extreme loss than anything experienced since the late 1970s. Back then, the dollar lost a quarter of its value between 1975 and 1979, which roughly fits with current experience.