$100 in 1929 is worth $97.66 in 1930,
because prices declined 2.3% over that period, an average of
2.34% a year.
$100 in 1929 has
the same buying power as
$97.66
in 1930
Detailed inflation statistics
Cumulative price change
-2.3%
Average inflation rate
-2.34% per year
Converted amount ($100 base)
$97.66
Price difference ($100 base)
-$2.34
CPI in 1929
17.1
CPI in 1930
16.7
Inflation in 1929
0.00%
Inflation in 1930
-2.34%
$100 in 1929 → 1930
$97.66
$100 in 1930 → 1929
$102
What happened to prices between 1929 and 1930
Between 1929 and 1930, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.1 to 16.7.
Cumulatively, prices declined 2.3%, which works out to an average of
-2.34% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1929 bought what
$1.02 buys in 1930: the 1929 dollar
gained 2.4% in purchasing power over
these 1 years.
Consumer prices were unchanged in 1929, the CPI’s annual average flat for
the second time in six years and a fitting close to a decade that began with
wartime inflation and ended in rough price stability. By year’s end the
index stood 14.5% below its 1920 peak and roughly 73% above its
1913 starting point, a reminder that even a “stable” decade
left prices well above where they had started. The stability in the cost of
living masked what was building in financial markets. The National Bureau
of Economic Research dates the start of the Great Depression to that
August, the month the business cycle peaked, months before most Americans
noticed anything was wrong. The break came that October: panic selling hit
Wall Street on Black Thursday, October 24, and returned even worse on Black
Tuesday, October 29, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 12% in
a single session. Billions of dollars in paper wealth disappeared within
days, and the crash marked the start of a downturn that would pull consumer
prices into their steepest sustained decline of the 20th century over the
next four years. First-class postage was still 2 cents, a price that would
hold until 1932.
Every 1929 amount converts to 1930 at the same ratio, 0.98: $1,000 becomes
$977, and $10,000 becomes $9,766.
Amount in 1929
Value in 1930
$1.00
$0.98
$5.00
$4.88
$10.00
$9.77
$20.00
$19.53
$50.00
$48.83
$100
$97.66
$500
$488
$1,000
$977
$5,000
$4,883
$10,000
$9,766
$100,000
$97,661
$1,000,000
$976,608
Inflation by spending category, 1929–1930
Every category fell between 1929 and 1930: food the most, down 5.5%, and apparel the least, down 2.0%. The headline number is an average; here is what $100 of 1929
spending costs in 1930, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1929 →
All items (CPI-U)
-2.34%
$97.66
Apparel
-2.02%
$97.98
Food
-5.45%
$94.55
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1929: core (all items less food & energy) (1957–), energy (1957–), housing (1967–), medical care (1935–), transportation (1935–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Year by year: CPI and the value of $100 from 1929
$100 from 1929shrank to $97.66 by 1930; each row
shows the CPI, that year's inflation rate, and the running value.
In 1930, prices fell 2.3% and $100 from 1929 had the buying
power of $97.66; the year's average CPI of 16.7 is the level
behind every 1930 figure on this page.
Consumer prices fell 2.3% in 1930, a mild decline compared with what was
coming but the first sign that the summer 1929 downturn was not going to be
short. The National Bureau of Economic Research dates that contraction from
August 1929, and by the time it finally bottomed out in March 1933 it would
run 43 months, the longest of any downturn in the NBER’s chronology back to
1854. Congress made the trade picture worse in June, when President Hoover
signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, raising duties on more than 20,000
imported goods to some of the highest levels in a century. Trading partners
retaliated with tariffs of their own, and global trade volumes collapsed
over the next several years, deepening a downturn economists still debate
how much the tariff itself worsened. The financial system cracked that fall:
a regional banking panic culminated in the December 11 failure of the Bank
of United States in New York, at the time the largest bank failure in
American history, wiping out more than $200 million in deposits. It was the
first of four banking panics that would hit the country before 1933 was
out. Consumer prices still stood 68.7% above their 1913
starting point, but the direction had clearly turned. First-class postage
held at 2 cents, unchanged for eleven straight years.
MLA: “Inflation from 1929 to 1930: $100 is worth $97.66 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1929-to-1930/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1929 to 1930. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1929-to-1930/