In the 70'sthe U.S. suffered from soaring inflation, by U.S. standards, along with stagnation -- thus the term stagflation was attached to it.  The soaring inflation had two primary components:  asset (commodity) inflation and wage inflation.  The commodity inflation was caused by two primary factors:  the OPEC cartel clamping down on production in order to drive up prices and inflation hedging.

The current commodity inflation has a different primary cause.  It has primarily been caused by demand growth (rather than by an orchestrated constraint on supplies), largely from very strong growth within emerging economies, putting severe constraints on excess supply capacity.

Also, the current situation does not have a wage inflation problem.  U.S. workers power to negotiate for higher wages has severely diminished since the 70's primarily as a result of the much smaller percentage of unionized workers, and the loss of strength by unions, and because of increased competition as a result of outsourcing and technological advances such as the internet and other info technologies.

The challenges the current economy is going through are more akin to the 1930's.   The challenges then, like now, were primarily caused by the prior buildup of a massive credit/debt (depending on which side your looking from) bubble.  That does not necessarily mean that the U.S. is headed into a depression, as occurred in the 1930s.  The situation in the 1930s, and similarly in Japan in the 1990s, was badly exacerbated by some very poor economic policies by the government, at least according to most economists.   Hopefully, the challenges of deleveraging our economy, i.e. unwinding the excessive credit and debt levels, have been and will continue to be handled better than then.  Bernanke is one of the world's leading authorities on the U.S. depression of the 1930s, perhaps the top authority on it.  He has been very aggressive and creative in fighting the credit crisis so far.  I think it is fair to say that most who saw the enormity of the growing credit crisis a year or more ago expected the economy and equity markets to suffer much more severely by now than they actually have.  As it now stands now more than a year after the broad based U.S. indices started putting in their bull market tops, led by the midcap and smallcap indices, equities have only suffered a very mild bear market and the economy a very mild recession.  How much worse, if at all, it gets remains to be seen.