On Dec. 23, the Sun Journal ran a story by Kevin G. Hall of McClatchy Newspapers about the Federal Reserve’s policy of buying government bonds.

While the story was generally accurate, it had one glaring error in it. Hall stated that “… inflation, or a rise in prices across the economy, can happen only in an environment of economic growth.”

That is simply not true.

For example, in the U.S. in the early 1980s, the inflation rate was high (around 10 percent, depending on which inflation measure is used) and the unemployment rate was rising (there was a recession) and reached almost 10 percent even by the official measure, while real GDP shrank.

There are many other cases of this sort of combination of zero or negative growth combined with inflation — even negative real growth — while inflation rates continued to rise. The usual term for this is “stagflation.”

While there is little immediate risk of this happening in the U.S. now, the claim that it is impossible is false and misleading.

Neil Garston, Lewiston