Stagflation — The Economic Nightmare of the 1970s

In the 1960s, economists believed they had cracked the code of the modern economy. They had a formula — a reliable relationship between inflation and unemployment — and for years it held. Then the 1970s arrived, and everything they thought they knew collapsed. Between 1973 and 1982, the United States experienced something the textbooks said was impossible. Prices rose. Jobs disappeared. The economy stagnated. All at once. They called it stagflation, and for nearly a decade, no one in Washington had a convincing answer for how to stop it. This documentary tells the full economic story — from the monetary decisions of the 1960s that left the economy vulnerable, to the oil supply shocks that triggered the crisis, to the Federal Reserve's failed attempts to contain it under Arthur Burns, and finally to the painful, deliberate recession that Paul Volcker engineered to break inflation for good. No politics. No partisan framing. Just the mechanics of a broken economy, the human cost it left behind, and the hard lessons that reshaped modern central banking forever. Shadow Archives covers the economic history America forgot — or never fully understood. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:35 The 1960s — Confidence Before the Crisis 3:42 1971 — The Dollar Untethered from Gold 4:48 1973 — The First Oil Shock 7:14 The Fed's Impossible Choice — Arthur Burns 9:21 1979 — The Second Oil Shock 12:04 Inflationary Expectations — The Psychology of Crisis 12:58 1979 — Volcker Takes the Helm 14:15 The Volcker Shock — Interest Rates at Twenty Percent 14:44 The Deliberate Recession — 1981–1982 17:19 1983 — Inflation Broken 19:36 The Lessons of Stagflation 22:47 Was It Inevitable? 24:21 Legacy — How the 1970s Rebuilt Central Banking