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"How inflation fears shaped American society, then and now. For most of its history, the United States has benefited from price stability-a steady relationship between supply and demand, characterized by prices that don't inflate or deflate in unpredictable fashion. Across these long stretches, the US economy became famously free-market: prices did the job of stabilizing the economy so the government didn't have to. In this sweeping and revelatory history of American economy and democracy, Carola Conces Binder shows that American price-stability is no accident. From its colonial origins to today, the American state has been designed for, and continues to be shaped by, an unlimited effort to insulate the economy from the dangers of price fluctuations. Binder narrates an American history in which inflationary anxiety has informed everything from the reluctant establishment of paper money to the rise of the modern Federal Reserve as an omniscient actor in public policy. At every step, and with each historical brush with monetary instability, the US has been reinvented as a response to its most recent failings. Shock Values is the epochal history of the US as a monetary state. Binder recounts both the monetary interests at the dawn of the Republic; its decades-long experiments with price controls; the outsize role of agriculture and industry in its monetary apparatus; and how the rise of the all-powerful Federal Reserve was born out of crisis more than anything else. Expansive and erudite, Shock Values is a watershed telling of an old history: how American union's pledge to be more perfect was drawn along monetary lines. It is not to be missed."

Since mid-2014, the long-run inflation expectations of consumers have been declining. We analyze University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers microdata and find that a decline in uncertainty about future inflation is a modest part of the story over this period—but it represents the entire story when considering changes in expectations since 2012.

The Federal Open Market Committee's inflation target is stated in terms of the personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI). The PCEPI, like the consumer price index (CPI), measures inflation in the expenditures of households, but these indexes differ in purpose, scope, and construction. Notably, since the CPI is used as the reference rate for numerous financial contracts, one can derive implied longer-run CPI inflation forecasts from financial contracts. Such forecasts are widely reported. But if policymakers are to use these forecasts to guide their pursuit of the inflation target, they need to translate these CPI inflation forecasts into corresponding implied PCEPI forecasts. Since 1978, CPI inflation has averaged 0.3 percentage points above PCEPI inflation, but this differential has varied significantly over time. In this Commentary, we explain why, investigate a key historical episode, and provide an updated estimate of the likely differential going forward.