The nature of markets is that they are never quite settled, as investors recalibrate expectations constantly and reset prices. In most time periods, those recalibrations and resets tend to be small and in both directions, resulting in the ups and downs that pass for normal volatility. Clearly, we are not in one of those time periods, as markets approach bipolar territory, with big moves up and down. The good news is that the culprit behind the volatility is easy to identify, and it is inflation, but the bad news is that inflation remains the most unpredictable of all macroeconomic factors to factor into stock prices and value. In this post, I will look at where we stand on inflation expectations, and the different paths we can end up on, ranging from potentially catastrophic to mostly benign.
Inflation: The Full Story
I wrote my first post on this blog in 2008, and inflation merited barely a mention until 2020, though it is an integral component of investing and valuation. Since 2020, though, inflation has become a key story line in almost every post that I write about the overall market, and I have had multiple posts just on the topic. To see why inflation has become so newsworthy, take a look at the chart below, where I graph inflation from 1950 to 2022, in the United States:
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While I report multiple measures of inflation, from the consumer price index (adjusted and unadjusted) to the producer price index, to (Read more...)