I never said that OPEC had anything to do with the debt increases. But since you brought it up, OPEC did have a role in the sustained high inflation of the 70’s.
Inflation can be caused by both a debasement of the currency and increased material costs or shortages of materials.

“Since internationally traded commodities are priced in dollars, the falling dollar made stockpiling metals, grains and oil appear cheaper to foreigners who bid their prices up in dollars. That demand-side effect inflated commodity prices so long as the dollar fell, which meant many years. But it also had a big supply-side impact on the sellers of commodities, because it encouraged suppliers of storable commodities such as oil and crude oil to withhold supplies until they got more dollars per barrel (or per ounce) to compensate for the dollar’s shrinking buying power.

https://www.aier.org/article/nixonomics-in-retrospect-devaluation-and-wage-price-controls-august-15-1971/

“Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in his semiannual testimony before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee in March 2022 that, as a rule of thumb, every $10 per barrel increase in the price of crude oil raises inflation by 0.2% and sets back economic growth 0.1%”

Then there’s this: “Crude oil was a bigger contributor to inflation in the 1970s, when it was used much more intensively per unit of economic output. Back then, the U.S. economy consumed more than a barrel of crude per $1,000 of gross domestic product. By 2015, that had dropped to about 0.4 barrels per $1,000 of GDP.”

“…Historically, oil prices have exerted more influence on the Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures the prices of goods at the wholesale level, than the CPI, which measures the prices consumers pay for goods and services.”
“Between 1970 and 2017, the correlation between oil prices and the PPI was 0.71. That’s much stronger than the 0.27 correlation with the CPI, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.”

“The weaker link between oil prices and consumer prices likely comes from the relatively higher weight of services in the U.S. consumption basket, which you’d expect to rely less on oil as a production input,” according to the St. Louis Fed.”

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/oilpricesinflation.asp

They paid interest on reserves and dramatically lowered the money multiplier.

Has nothing to do with OPEC, everything to do with our dysfunctional and irresponsible federal legislature.

Elevated interest rates would be present on new issues. This would generate a burden for bonds, notes, and bills issued over a circumscribed set of years.

By the way, since the first OPEC embargo, the national debt has doubled about every 9 years.

If so, how do we explain the eight b years of quantitative easing and low interest rates following 2008. If inflation was always a monetary issue, we would have had inflation during those years. IMO, the full and “just-in-time” supply chain had a lot to do with keeping inflatioon in check during that period.

Decrease the supply of anything and the price rises. (Supply side economics.) Decrease the supply of an item so basic to the production of nearly everything as oil is, and you will see prices for most things rise, even in the absence of monetary stimulation. Admittedly, the price rises, absent monetary stimulation will be self-limiting because people stop buying as much. This usually leads to recession/depression and eventual lower prices. And, a lot of human suffering. However, in the case of food and fuel, (both highly dependent on oil prices) it’s very n difficult to cut spending. This leads to bankruptcies and other financial tragedies.

To get the balance correct between monetary supply and a full supply chain isn’t easy. However, I would prefer a full supply chain and low energy prices for fighting inflation as opposed to the Fed getting interest rates and monetary supply “just right.”

Mike Rowe explains that 7.3 million able-bodied men have dropped out of the work force since 2020. He can’t explain why. There are undoubtedly different reasons. What he does know is that the price for skilled and unskilled labor has risen dramatically. Supply is not meeting demand. Supply side again.

I was in the airline industry in the 1970s and 80s. Believe me, the OPEC oil price shocks and resulting shortages affected that business for the entire time. Statistics are one thing, but actual conditions on the ground affecting people’s jobs and livelihoods aren’t always reflected in the statistics. One can study the statistics of any economic disaster and claim to know exactly what happened, but not understand the jig saw of various areas and industries that don’t conform to the statistics. Lived experience does not always conform to statistics.

My point is that, for a country who’s founding documents place such a emphasis on the electorate being involved, the American electorate seems to place its emphasis on not being involved. At all levels of elections.

Richard Cook, you have a good point. New York City, which has elected such luminaries as AOC, has an average voter turnout of 23%. Some of that apathy may expire as inflation grows.

The gold standard was discontinued in 1933. The Bretton Woods system, which included an official gold price and fixed exchange rates, did not allow private ownership of monetary gold or for the international monetary system to be regulated by gold flows. Sir Alan Walters referred to Bretton Woods as a system of ‘Irish fixed rates’. “They’re fixed. Until they change”. He was of the opinion that you should have a fixed rate regime or a floating rate regime. He did not favor reinstitution of the classical gold standard, a project he called ‘crackers’. Milton Friedman favored floating rates. Inflation rates were higher after 1971 than prior to 1971, but the fixed rate regime was neither necessary nor sufficient to restabilize prices.

There is no way we could do that again.

We can and it can be accomplished in < 2 years. A project of restabilizing prices has been implemented successfully in countries of every possible description in the last generation.