Article in my local paper today about this, didn't call it stagflation but same general idea. Prices starting to rise, people still out of work. Quoted the director of Sunnyvale Community Services which is where I volunteered while out of work, she said they're seeing more and more people sign up for free food to make ends meet now. sad, it was bad enough when I was there in just 9 months I could see the increase in people needing help, now prices are going up too.
But the POTUS is going on tv to talk about gas prices so all is well.
There's a basic Austrian theory about stagflation and it goes something like this.
During a time of loose money, ie the FED giving banks 0% rates letting them in effect heal themselves by borrowing at zero and investing in treasuries at 3.5% with infinite leverage, this flushes new money into the system and the greatest beneficiaries of this are the first users, IE the banks.
As this washes through the economy though people realize they're being flooded with new money, so the value of this new money starts to degrade as it goes through the system, or becomes obvious it's there, dropping the value of all money in the system because the amount of money is now bigger.
The last people to get ahold of this new money are the people who actually produces stuff and so they get the least benefit out of it and their wealth is stolen and in effect transfered to the bankers.
This reduces productivity and growth by starving the producers of value and giving it to the bankers.
This is why you get rising prices and crappy growth and given the size of the wad of this policy that's just been unleashed upon us you can expect this to be horrific in it's implications for stagflation.
Stagflation is where everyone basically but banks and those nearest the newly flowing money gets poorer and poorer the closer you get to someone who actually produces something, it's ass backwards in other words.
IMO it's not exactly the same as the 70's version, remember though that Nixon in effect took us off the gold standard and set in motion the price hikes later on with a flood of fiat money.
During that time the boomers were demographically different than now, that was a perfect storm of another kind, with crazy demand, crazy crappy unemployment, crazy de-industrialization and money printing it was truly maxed out weird with the Vietnam spending hitting enormous amounts too.
This time around housing is in the toilet first but the productive economy is next up.
I would say this entire crisis we're seeing now is merely the foundations of a massive one to come within about a decade.
IMO we'll putter along getting weaker and weaker for a near death knockout blow to be delivered via the bond market at a later date, until then I think prices will remain subdued due to a tug of war between inflation and deflation.