The Squeeze of '79

Even by the standards of the 1970s, the decade of recurring recession, relentless inflation and repeated runs on the no longer almighty dollar, it was a wild week. For some time, Americans had seemed able to ignore or nimbly thrust out of mind repeated symptoms of their out-of-joint economy, like alarming new price rises and further drubbings of the greenback abroad. But last week those distant, or perhaps too familiar, woes hit home, and hard, in a burst of financial hysteria that engulfed markets, speculators...