With inflation rising and hiring slowing, a dreaded word is back in the conversation: "stagflation."

Widely seen as a nightmare economic scenario, it's the rare double blow of rising prices and weak growth, squeezing consumers at the checkout line and in the job market.

"The whiff of stagflation is getting stronger," Harvard economics professor Jason Furman wrote on the social media platform X Thursday. "There are no good options for the Fed given the set of circumstances we're facing."

Furman's warning followed new Labor Department data showing consumer prices rose 2.9 percent in August from a year earlier, the fastest annual pace since January. At the same time, hiring has slowed sharply, and the unemployment rate — now 4.3 percent — is at its highest level in four years.

Those conditions have put Fed policymakers in a tough spot: ease interest rates to support the labor market or keep them higher for longer to bring inflation down to the 2 percent target.

It's a version of the same dilemma that haunted monetary officials in the 1970s and early 1980s, when stagflation emerged, eventually driving both inflation and unemployment into double........

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