Since the 1980s, the United States has prioritized low inflation, to great success. Policymakers have regularly kept inflation at or below their 2-percent targets, even during periods with record-low interest rates. As a result, many observers have been — and continue to be — pretty comfortable with spending trillions of dollars on pandemic relief… and now infrastructure projects. But what if the low inflation we’ve experienced has been temporary? What if an aging workforce and diminishing returns from globalization will cause wages and prices to begin rising more steeply? That’s the argument made by today’s guests, Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan.

Charles is a financial markets professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, and a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. Manoj is the founder and chief economist of the independent macroeconomic research firm Talking Heads. They are the co-authors of “The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival,” released last August.