Analysis of the BLS CPIAUCSL monthly series from January 1913 to February 2026 demonstrates that 72% of cumulative U.S. price-level increase occurred in four compressed windows totaling roughly 29% of the 113-year span: 1916–1920 (WWI fiscal surge and gold-standard strain), 1941–1951 (WWII mobilization and postwar pent-up demand), 1968–1982 (Great Inflation), and 2021–2023 (post-COVID demand stimulus colliding with supply constraints). The dollar’s 96.9% loss of nominal purchasing power since 1914 is therefore better understood as a sequence of monetary-fiscal regime breaks than as steady erosion.

Primary BLS data, cross-referenced with Federal Reserve Board records of M2 growth and wartime deficit financing, show each episode coincided with sharp accelerations in base-money creation and federal outlays unmatched by contemporaneous tax revenue. The 1968–1982 period alone produced 30.2% of total cumulative inflation—more than either world-war window—yet the original eco3min dataset understates how FOMC transcripts from 1971–1978 reveal explicit political pressure on Chairman Burns to delay tightening ahead of elections, a pattern repeated in milder form during 2021 stimulus debates.

Multiple perspectives emerge from primary documents. Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History (using Federal Reserve Banking and Monetary Statistics) attributes the Great Inflation primarily to excessive money-supply growth after the 1965–1968 fiscal acceleration and Bretton Woods collapse. Contemporary FOMC minutes and the 1972 Economic Report of the President instead emphasize supply shocks (Vietnam War resource diversion, 1973 OPEC embargo) and cost-push wage spirals, citing the Council of Economic Advisers’ own Phillips-curve models. Post-COVID analyses in the 2023 Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco working paper No. 2023-14 decompose the 2021–2023 surge into roughly 40% supply-chain disruption (measured via PMI supplier-delivery indices) and 60% demand stimulus (American Rescue Plan outlays), illustrating how both monetarist excess-reserves and Keynesian fiscal-multiplier channels operated simultaneously.

The original coverage correctly flags the disappearance of deflation after April 2015 but misses the policy asymmetry codified in the Fed’s 2012 and 2020 framework statements: explicit 2% average-inflation targeting combined with forward guidance that tolerates overshoots while resisting undershoots. Congressional Budget Office baseline projections (2024 Long-Term Budget Outlook) further highlight that current debt-to-GDP above 120% creates fiscal dominance risks reminiscent of the 1940s, when the Fed capped Treasury yields until the 1951 Treasury-Fed Accord. No such accord exists today.

Pattern recognition across these episodes reveals common precursors: (1) large, unanticipated fiscal commitments during geopolitical stress; (2) monetary accommodation justified by output-gap arguments; (3) subsequent erosion of central-bank credibility once expectations unanchor. Investors and policymakers relying on linear 2% extrapolations therefore misprice tail regimes. Primary historical records—from wartime Treasury-Fed correspondence to the 1979 Volcker transcripts—consistently show that regime shifts are recognizable in real time only when money, deficits, and supply shocks converge. The data suggest the next such convergence, rather than any constant drift, will determine the dollar’s next material loss of purchasing power.