ABSTRACT
The price peak came approximately at the end of the Civil War, a year and a half after the end of World War I, and three years after World War II. Unfortunately, no satisfactory data are available on short period movements in national income in the Civil War. The immediate occasion for the rise in prices and money income was of course the diversion of resources to war use. The substantial rise in real output during World War II, compared to little change during World War I, undoubtedly eased the physical and psychological problems of attaining such an impressively large war output. It is less obvious just how it affected the financial and monetary problem of avoiding inflation. Price and income changes during the three wartime periods seem more readily explicable by the quantity theory than by the income-expenditure theory.
