In a lecture yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made the mistake of talking about inflation during his critique of the gold standard, going so far as to say that when the barbarous relic was used as the foundation of our monetary system “over the medium run, it sometimes caused periods of inflation and deflation” (see this item from earlier in the day for links and other specifics).

That struck me as a particularly odd way of addressing a subject that probably shouldn’t have been addressed at all and that prompted the creation of the chart shown below using data from ... the Federal Reserve.

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