The beef over price controls

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2022

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Inflation reached a 40-year high today of 7%! There's been a storm of debate about an old anti-inflation policy: Price controls. So we dust off the history books and see what happened in World War II.

Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:11.4	This is the indicator from Planet Money, I'm Stacey Vannick Smith.
0:14.4	And I'm Darnwoods, and this year the world of economics and economists and the people
0:19.8	who love them.
0:20.8	People who love them, like us.
0:22.0	It started off with a bang.
0:23.5	There's been this heated controversy about price controls.
0:27.0	Indeed. And it all kind of got going because of this piece in the Guardian newspaper, this
0:31.7	newspaper out of the UK, which said that we need to have a serious conversation about price
0:37.5	controls.
0:38.5	Price controls is like a red rag to a bull.
0:41.9	The bull in this case is mainstream economists.
0:45.2	And one particular economist, Paul Krugman, wrote on Twitter that this was a truly stupid
0:50.5	idea.
0:51.5	The man was not mincing words, you know?
0:53.5	You know?
0:54.5	He was not.
0:55.5	He was straight, Paul.
0:57.2	You know, economists, they are a cultured group, Paul apparently later deleted that tweet
1:01.6	and apologized.
1:02.6	That's true.
1:03.6	And part of the reason why price controls is coming up right now is that prices are rising
	...

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