Was anyone around last time we had a good blast of inflation courtesy of J. Carter? People can debate the inflation-control methods they used to reign it in called Reaganomics, or supply-side economics but IIRC, inflation rates went from above 10% to less than 5% by the October 87 market "major correction" called Black Monday. The debt soared from 1980-87 and that was believed to be a major factor pushing stock prices down, along with more monetary policies coming out of Congress (sound familiar?). To this day there's nobody that can definitely point to what the root cause was for that correction. But there wasn't the stop-trade trigger points there are today to allow breathing room. Had there been, it may not have been as severe a correction.
Top earner tax rates went from 70% to 50% and corporate taxes slashed to 34%. Still pretty high. Bad things were increased Social Security taxes and a long-term plan to raise Social Security age for boomers which is happening now.
I was so happy to see that, in general, interest rates dropped BELOW 10% for new-car financing sometime in 1986 as the economy slowed down after the big tax cuts. Deregulating everything helped initially, but in long-term I think it shouldn't have been that fast. JMO. All of Reaganomics will not work this time around, but the stopping of printing money and giving it away would help.
I financed my then-new 85 442 through South Carolina National Bank (I think Wachovia bought them up in the 90s, who then got sucked up by Wells Fargo). I'll have to dig out my contract but I believe it was around 13% interest. GMAC was even worse had I gone that route. Honestly, I can't even believe how people were getting loans back then with the loan-to-value constraints in place. I do know it was tougher to meet the bar for a car loan back then, and mortgages were a PITA. I do know it was nice seeing a few percentage points on the left of the decimal on savings accounts where they actually paid you something for keeping money in their bank.
It's funny, I was reading an "old" article that was written way back in January of 2020 about the last administration's economic explosion and how strong the consumer confidence was as were corporate earnings, and jobs jobs jobs....and that was only 18 months ago. And IMO, that's the exact reason the Covid wasn't as financially painful as it surely could have been. If we were in the same economic shape back in March 2020 as we are now when the pandemic hit, I'd probably be in a FEMA food line somewhere. It's amazing how fast you can throw an economy into a ditch.
