Value of $100 in 1929, adjusted to 1937

What happened to prices between 1929 and 1937

Between 1929 and 1937, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.1 to 14.4. Cumulatively, prices declined 15.8%, which works out to an average of -2.13% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1929 bought what $1.19 buys in 1937.

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.

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The destination year: 1937

Consumer prices rose 3.6% in 1937, the fastest pace since before the Depression and the fourth straight year of gains, leaving prices 10.8% above their 1933 trough though still 15.8% below the 1929 peak. The recovery did not last the year. The National Bureau of Economic Research dates a new business cycle peak to that May, the start of what became known as the Recession of 1937-38. Policy tightened on two fronts at once: the Federal Reserve had doubled bank reserve requirements over the preceding year to head off inflation it worried was building, and the federal government pulled back its own spending even as new Social Security payroll taxes began draining money from paychecks months before the first benefit checks went out. Together they choked off a recovery that had not yet reached its pre-Depression footing. Not every milestone that year was economic. The Golden Gate Bridge opened to traffic on May 27 after four years of construction, at the time the longest suspension bridge span in the world, a rare bright spot in a year that would end with the economy sliding backward again. First-class postage held at 3 cents.

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