Value of $100 in 1922, adjusted to 1931

What happened to prices between 1922 and 1931

Between 1922 and 1931, the Consumer Price Index went from 16.8 to 15.2. Cumulatively, prices declined 9.5%, which works out to an average of -1.11% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1922 bought what $1.11 buys in 1931.

Consumer prices fell another 6.1% in 1922, the second straight year of decline, even as the broader economy climbed out of the Depression of 1920-21 and industrial production rebounded. The CPI had now given back roughly a third of its wartime runup, though it stayed well above the 1913 baseline. Congress moved to shield that recovery from foreign competition: the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act, signed September 21, raised duties on hundreds of imported goods to some of the highest levels in U.S. history, a policy meant to protect farmers and manufacturers still adjusting to postwar prices. Labor tension flared even as prices fell. Roughly half a million bituminous coal miners struck that April over wage cuts employers had imposed as prices dropped, and hundreds of thousands of railroad shop workers walked out in July in a separate dispute over pay and work rules, together the largest strike wave since 1919. Both disputes dragged on for months and drew federal mediation before ending without full concessions for the workers. First-class postage remained at 2 cents.

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The destination year: 1931

Consumer prices fell 9.0% in 1931, a sharp acceleration from the 2.3% decline in 1930, as falling wages, collapsing farm prices, and a fresh wave of bank failures fed a downward spiral that the still-contracting economy could not shake. More than 2,000 banks failed during the year, far more than in 1930, as depositors who had watched earlier banks go under pulled their cash out of ones they feared were next. The crisis went international that September, when Britain suspended the gold standard amid a run on sterling. The Federal Reserve’s response made the domestic downturn worse before it made anything better: to defend the dollar’s own gold backing, the Fed raised its discount rate sharply that October, in two steps from 1.5% to 3.5%, tightening credit at the exact moment the economy needed the opposite. Not every headline that year was grim. The Empire State Building opened its doors on May 1, briefly the tallest building in the world, though so much of Manhattan’s office space sat vacant amid the Depression that tenants stayed scarce and New Yorkers took to calling it the “Empty State Building.” Consumer prices had now fallen for two straight years and stood 53.5% above their 1913 level, down from the 68.7% margin of just twelve months before. First-class postage remained at 2 cents.

More about inflation in 1931 →