Yesterday I linked to this post by Yglesias on inflation. Commenter Max made a good point:

During the 90's and the early oughts, we also had a bigtime money-printing in place. Arguably we were expanding our money supply faster during the 90's and the oughts than we were in the '70's. (And here the Austrians have the their one useful insight: banking is a license to print money, and each bank is its own little Federal Reserve.) We did not suffer anomalous increases in unit labor costs (but we did have anomalous increases in the amount of credit!). And just so not coincidentally oil supplies were steadily increasing in volume during the period. When economic growth outran the ability to support steadily increasing growth, pop went the weasel. (emphasis added)

Also, on the difference between demand-pull/demand driven and cost-push inflation, commenter Philip Pinkelton writes:

You have to track causality here. Why did the unit labour costs rise? My reading is that unions saw inflation go up that was largely driven by oil price rises. When they saw prices go up they started demanding higher wages and this led to a classic wage-price spiral.

The underlying cause was the oil embargo. The response was the wage-bargaining on behalf of the workers. Then, wage-price spiral.

Here's the inflation from the era -- note the oil embargo kicks in in Oct. 1973 and instantly causes oil prices to skyrocket, the inflation then tracks this:

http://www.econedlink.org/lessons/images_lessons/6...

So, this was NOT a case of pure demand-led inflation which might result from a government running too high deficits. This was a political crisis which triggered an institutional crisis.

This sounds right to me. Inflation went also because of the Fed reserve trying to curry favor with Nixon and Vietnam War spending. There were a lot of variables, but it got locked in because of the power of unions to negotiate wage increases in anticipation (expectation) of further price increases. And so on. So maybe some of it was demand.