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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

You're right but people aren't dumping their "dollars", vast majority of which aren't the base money that the Fed prints but are financial assets (it's like a 1:100 ratio[1]). Look at all asset classes, there's no selling going on.

[1] yes it's not exactly 1:100, if you feel like correcting a stranger on the internet please go on and pull the data from Fed datasets; i only meant to be accurate up to the order of magnitude.

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Financial assets going up is precisely a sign of inflation. Argentina has 40% inflation and the best performing stock market (if you denominate in Argentinian currency)

How does it do priced in some basket of goods that people actually consume?

Bad. That’s why you don’t hold equities during hyperinflation. You hold physical assets, like gold and real estate.

Yeah but this doesn't necessarily work. I actually investigated Argentinian real estate not long ago and it's declining (in real terms, let's say in USD which experiences very low inflation), quite obviously due to it being overvalued and the real GDP decline + deleveraging.

What about gold?

Holding gold is less useful that you may think:

> Gold objects have existed for thousands of years but for many investors gold has only recently become a tradable investment opportunity. Gold has been described as an inflation hedge, a “golden constant”, with a long run real return of zero. Yet over 1, 5, 10, 15 and 20 year investment horizons the variation in the nominal and real returns of gold has not been driven by realized inflation. The real price of gold is currently high compared to history. In the past, when the real price of gold was above average, subsequent real gold returns have been below average. Given this situation is it time to explore “this time is different” rationalizations? We show that new mined supply is surprisingly unresponsive to prices. In addition, authoritative estimates suggest that about three quarters of the achievable world supply of gold has already been mined. On the demand side, we focus on the official gold holdings of many countries. If prominent emerging markets increase their gold holdings to average per capita or per GDP holdings of developed countries, the real price of gold may rise even further from today’s elevated levels. As a result investors in gold face a daunting dilemma: 1) embrace a view that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, there is a “golden constant” and the purchasing power of gold is likely to fall or 2) embrace a view that “this time is different” and the “golden constant” is dead.

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2078535

> Financial assets going up is precisely a sign of inflation.

No, it is not. Inflation is the costs of goods and services that roughly correspond to cost of living.

When you start talking about asset prices rising there is another term that we already have to cover that:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble

Then why inflation in the 70’s hammered stocks?

https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/1979/08/Death-of-Equ...

Aren't dollars and assets fundamentally different things? Land would keep up with inflation, while dollars wouldn't for example.

> financial assets

Also, many real assets are very dependent on real rates, for example real estate or gold. Imagine the mortgage rate tripling from today's levels (definitely possible), what do you think this will do to prices? I.e. what would happen if all mortgage payments increased 3x for new mortgages?

With gold the story is actually similar, because gold is like an very long duration ultra high quality bond.

Real rates become more negative with inflation though. US can’t afford high real rates, debt is 130% of GDP and Social Security is unfunded by $35T

This could actually happen (deep negative real rates), but by no means is guaranteed. There are far, far more indebted large governments out there.

If it happens yeah pretty likely getting real estate and preferably on mortgage will do splendidly.

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