Value of $100 in 1932, adjusted to 1973

What happened to prices between 1932 and 1973

Between 1932 and 1973, the Consumer Price Index went from 13.7 to 44.4. Cumulatively, prices increased 224.1%, which works out to an average of 2.91% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1932 bought what $0.31 buys in 1973.

Consumer prices fell 9.9% in 1932, the steepest single-year drop in the CPI’s history to that point and the third straight year of decline following 1930 and 1931. Wages, farm incomes, and industrial output all kept falling, and Congress tried to arrest the credit collapse by creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that January, capitalized at $500 million with authority to borrow up to $1.5 billion to lend directly to banks, railroads, and other struggling businesses. Relief did not reach ordinary households as quickly. That summer, tens of thousands of World War I veterans and their families camped in Washington demanding early payment of a service bonus not due until 1945; in July, U.S. Army troops under General Douglas MacArthur forcibly dispersed the encampment, an episode that badly damaged the Hoover administration’s standing months before an election it was already losing. Voters delivered their verdict on November 8, electing Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide over the incumbent Hoover on a promise of relief and a “new deal for the American people.” Roosevelt would not take office until the following March, leaving a long and difficult transition during the depths of the crisis. First-class postage rose from 2 cents to 3 cents on July 6, the first change to the rate since 1919.

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The destination year: 1973

Consumer prices rose 6.2% in 1973, nearly double 1972’s 3.2%, as Nixon’s wage and price controls were phased out through the year and pressure the controls had been holding back broke loose. The bigger shock arrived that October, when Arab oil-producing states embargoed exports to the United States and other supporters of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Crude oil, which had traded around $3 a barrel, approached $12 by early 1974, and gas lines became a fixture outside filling stations nationwide. Earlier in the year, the Paris Peace Accords, signed that January 27, ended direct American combat in Vietnam and set a 60-day deadline for withdrawing remaining U.S. troops, even as fighting between North and South Vietnam went on. Financial markets read the year correctly as a turning point: the Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 1,051.70 on January 11, a level it would not reach again until 1980, before the oil shock and rising interest rates dragged it into a two-year bear market. A median household earned $10,512 in 1973, a new home sold for a median $32,500, and gas averaged 38.5 cents a gallon, still under half of what the embargo’s effects would bring the following year. Consumer prices stood 348.5% above their 1913 level by year’s end, with the decade’s worst inflation still ahead.

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