A bad economic situation where two problems that usually do NOT come together arrive at the same time: prices keep going up, AND the economy is not growing, so companies do badly and many people cannot find work. Why is that strange? Normally, when prices rise fast it is because everyone is buying and business is hot — bad, but at least there are jobs. And when jobs disappear, people stop spending, so prices usually stop rising. Stagflation is the ugly case where you get the rising prices without the hot economy: your money buys less every month, and you may also lose your job. That is why economists talk about it with real fear. It is also hard to fix, and this is the important part. A government can fight rising prices by making money expensive to borrow — but that slows the economy further and kills more jobs. Or it can help the economy by making money cheap — but that pushes prices up even more. Every tool fixes one half and worsens the other. The word came out of Britain in 1965 and became famous in the 1970s, when oil prices jumped and many rich countries lived through exactly this. Since then it has been the standard name for the situation. It is a formal, technical word — news reports, economics classes, business writing. You would not use it about your own money problems. And you will hear it used loosely by journalists, as a scare word for 'the economy feels bad in more than one way', when the strict conditions are not really met.

停滯性通膨（台灣經濟新聞、課本都這樣講；也有人簡稱「停滯膨脹」）。指物價一直漲、經濟卻停住、失業增加同時發生。