IS INFLATION ENDING? ARE YOU READY?

Yes indeed, management consultants Shilling and Sokoloff respond to their first, rhetorical question; so, unready readers should stop speculating, pay off their debts, and buy quality stocks and bonds, while businesses should concentrate on cost-cutting and long-range planning. The unsurprising conclusion that the end of inflation favors creditors, not debtors--which, heavily padded, comprises the last three chapters--is chiefly what the book has to offer. The early chapters constitute a routine conservative explanation of the causes of inflation (government spending, plus regulation, income indexing, declining productivity, oil prices, a weak dollar, and ""inflation mentality""), not only stuffed with factual data (e.g., the effect of oil prices on the US, German, Japanese, and Third World economies), but also encumbered with jawbreakers like ""The ratio of total household debt outstanding to disposable income, a measure of the household's debt-repayment burden, had risen to around 0.75 of disposable income in the late 1970s, as illustrated in Exhibit 3-6, up from the 0.65 level that characterized the prior decade and a half."" Succeeding chapters are devoted to: 1) the dubious proposition that inflation must end because voters are more conservative (and speculation is raging); 2) implausible scenarios of economic collapse; 3) the possible/impossible-to-predict repetition of the Kondratieff wave. Unoriginal, unwieldy, uninstructive.