He is right about that, and that blunt reminder alone justifies the book. 

The book begins, "In 2021, inflation emerged from a multi-decade hibernation." Well, inflation had not really been in hibernation, but rather was continuing at a rate which had become considered acceptable. It was worry about inflation that had been hibernating. People found themselves caught up in the runaway inflation of 2021-2023, a wake-up call. As the book explores at length, that explosive inflation had been unexpected by the central banks, including the Federal Reserve, making their forecasts and assurances look particularly bad and proving once again that their knowledge of the future is as poor as everybody else's. 

Now, in the third quarter of 2024, after historically fast hikes in interest rates, the current rate of inflation is less. But average prices continue going up, so the dollar's purchasing power, lost to that runaway inflation, is gone forever. Inflation continues and has continued to exceed the Fed's 2-percent "target" rate. And the Fed's target itself is odd: it promises to create inflation forever. The math of 2-percent compound shrinkage demonstrates that the Fed wants to depreciate the dollar's purchasing power by 80 percent in each average lifetime. Somehow the Fed never mentions this. 

King shows us that such long-term disappearance of purchasing power has happened historically. Chapter 2, "A History of Inflation, Money and Ideas," has a good discussion, starting with the debate between John Locke and Isaac Newton, of the history, variations and continuing relevance of the quantity theory of money. It also contains an instructive table of the value of the British pound by century from 1300 to 2000. The champion century for depreciation of the pound was the twentieth. The pound began as the dominant global currency and ended it as an also-ran, while one pound of 1900 had shriveled in value to two pence by 2000. The century included the Great Inflation of the 1970s, during which British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced, the book relates, that "he hoped to bring inflation down to 10 percent by the end of 1975 and under 10 percent by the end of 1976." His hopes were disappointed, as King sardonically reports: "The actual numbers turned out to be, respectively, 24.9 percent and 15.1 percent."