Value of $100 in 1969, adjusted to 2019

What happened to prices between 1969 and 2019

Between 1969 and 2019, the Consumer Price Index went from 36.7 to 255.657. Cumulatively, prices increased 596.6%, which works out to an average of 3.96% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1969 bought what $0.14 buys in 2019: the 1969 dollar lost 85.6% of its purchasing power over these 50 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: 2019

In 2019, prices rose 1.8% and $100 from 1969 had the buying power of $697; the year's average CPI of 255.657 is the level behind every 2019 figure on this page.

2019 was the last ordinary year before COVID-19. Consumer prices rose 1.8%, slightly under the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, with gasoline averaging $2.60 a gallon. Median household income jumped to $68,703, the highest on record up to that point, and the median new home sold for about $328,000. A first-class stamp rose to 55 cents.

The Fed reversed course. After four increases in 2018, it cut rates three times, to 1.50–1.75%, citing slower global growth, trade tensions, and low inflation. In July the expansion that began in June 2009 became the longest in U.S. records, and in August the yield curve briefly inverted, a signal investors read as a recession warning.

For workers at the bottom of the pay scale, 2019 marked a milestone of a different kind. The federal minimum wage stayed at $7.25 and reached its tenth year without an increase, the longest gap since the wage was first set. Because prices had climbed about 19% since it was last raised in 2009, its buying power was lower than at any point in that span.

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