1989. While monetarists emphasize expectation, the strucuturalist theory of inertial inflation privileges distributive conflict. When prices are being increased in a staggered or indexed way, economic agents cannot change their expectatives: they have to increase prices just to keep their share in income. PUC's Rio de Janeiro group, that participate in the formulation of the theory, are falling in a monetarist trap when they privilege expectations instead of distributive conflict. (Introductory paper in book edited by José Marcio Rego)