Value of $100 in 1969, adjusted to 2015

What happened to prices between 1969 and 2015

Between 1969 and 2015, the Consumer Price Index went from 36.7 to 237.017. Cumulatively, prices increased 545.8%, which works out to an average of 4.14% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1969 bought what $0.15 buys in 2015: the 1969 dollar lost 84.5% of its purchasing power over these 46 years.

Consumer prices rose 5.5% in 1969, up from 1968’s 4.2% and the fastest pace since the Korean War era, as years of Vietnam War spending, a labor market with unemployment under 4%, and expansionary fiscal policy finally showed up fully in prices. Richard Nixon was inaugurated that January 20, pledging to curb rising prices without wage and price controls, a position he would reverse within two years. The decade’s most triumphant moment came that July 20, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited above, fulfilling the goal Kennedy had set in 1961 of landing a man on the lunar surface before the decade’s end. Culture and protest both reached new extremes that year: an estimated 400,000 people gathered on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock music festival that August, and a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village that June touched off days of resistance now credited with launching the modern gay rights movement. Consumer prices finished the decade 270.7% above their 1913 level, up 24.0% from where they stood in 1960. The 1960s had opened with inflation near 1% a year and closed with prices rising faster than at any point since Korea, setting up the Great Inflation that would define the 1970s. First-class postage held at 6 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.60 an hour.

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The destination year: 2015

In 2015, prices rose 0.1% and $100 from 1969 had the buying power of $646; the year's average CPI of 237.017 is the level behind every 2015 figure on this page.

2015 was almost a year with no inflation at all. Consumer prices rose 0.1%, the smallest increase since the 2009 decline, because energy prices kept falling. Gasoline averaged $2.45 a gallon, down from $3.37 in 2014, and a strong dollar made imported goods cheaper. The picture was different outside food and energy: core prices rose about 1.8% as rents and medical costs climbed.

Incomes finally showed real progress. Median household income reached $56,516, a large jump from $53,657, and the median new home sold for about $296,400. The federal minimum wage stayed at $7.25, and a first-class stamp stayed at 49 cents.

The Federal Reserve chose December to end its zero-rate policy, raising the target range to 0.25–0.50% for the first time since 2006. It moved even though headline inflation was far under 2%, arguing that the drag from energy was temporary. Earlier, a currency shift in China in August had shaken global markets and pushed oil below $40 a barrel. Prices in 2015 ended the year barely above their 2014 level.

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