The Death of Inflation: Surviving and Thriving in the Zero Era

The Western world is in the grip of overwhelming forces which are transforming the economic and business landscape and the lives of ordinary people. We are witnessing the death of perpetual inflation and the beginning of the "zero era". Imagine a world without inflation: prices in the shops rising in some years, but falling in others; pay rising by two or three per cent in the good years, but static or falling in the bad ones; house prices as likely to fall as to rise; and interest rates in the range of two to four per cent. A purely imaginary world? No. This is the way things were most of the time before the onset of perpetual inflation in the years after World War II - and it is the world we are returning to. In the zero era: house prices will do nothing more than creep up and in many years will fall; the "low" levels of housing turnover registered recently will become normal; annual pay rises will no longer be automatic; consumers will be extremely price-sensitive; business pricing will move from "cost-plus" to "price-minus"; both consumers and businesses will have to learn that most prices may go up or down, and some will only ever go down, in contrast to the last 60 years when prices only went up; antiques and works of art will cease to be viewed as speculative investments, and return to being viewed on their intrinsic merits; interest rates, both short and long, will have to fall to levels unseen for a generation; the transition to very low interest rates will bring big profits to bond-holders, but the financial markets will be unstable and there may be financial panics prompted by high debt levels. This volume examines the consequences of the zero era for the housing market, for the world of investment, for consumers and for business. Lambasting the conventional wisdom in economics, this book concludes that the zero era holds out both great promise and great peril. On the positive side, there are the advantages of lower interest rates and the clarity brought by the end of the confusion created by inflation. On the negative side, when the system is riddled with debt and uprepared for anything except prices continually rising, there is the danger of deflation.…