This essay argues that at the distance of a century, The Great Gatsby can be read not only for its startlingly contemporary portraits of a capitalist class fatally adrift from the living poor, but also for its experimental poetics concerning an economic metaphor that, today, doubles as a master explanatory key for everything from electoral defeats to authoritarian trade wars: inflation. The essay contends that the novel’s relation to inflation is more barometric than economic, and that Fitzgerald’s emphasis on inflationary pressures surprisingly recapitulates and complicates the analysis of inflation we find in Marx. Whereas Marx describes inflation as a contradiction internal to the law of value whose trajectory can be compared to a geometric ellipse, Fitzgerald opts for a more wayward elliptical diagram in Gatsby, one in which the hypertrophy of the money-form—that is, value at its most distended and inflated—propels toward the horizon of its own reversal: a form of the invaluable.