News Analysis The “menace of inflation” is back. Those who lived through the disastrous inflationary 1970s don’t want to relive them, yet that’s what some now fear. They worry the combination of Federal Reserve Bank’s “cheap money,” low interest rates, combined with unprecedented government spending will trigger 1970s inflation. “The Great Inflation was one of the most turbulent economic periods of the twentieth century,” researchers at the Richmond Fed wrote in 2016. “Inflation and economic output were highly volatile throughout the 1970s. Annual growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) climbed as high as 6.9 percent in 1972 and 1978 and fell as low as -1.9 percent in 1974, while inflation dipped to less than 3 percent in 1972 and spiked to more than 10 percent in 1974 and 1979,” researchers Thomas Lubik, Christian Matthes, and Tim Soblik wrote in an economic brief “The Burns Disinflation of 1974.” In the worst …