In a prominent Financial Times piece two days ago titled “How to protect your investment portfolio against inflation,” John Plender does a lot of fear-mongering about inflation and suggests precious little that investors can do to protect themselves against it. After a lot of historical digressions whose relevance is tenuous, and even though he notes that ‘between May 1 1972 and December 13 1974 the FT All-Share index lost 72.9 per cent of its value’, Plender argues that equities are a good inflation hedge. The claim has no basis in empirical reality. His evidence-free argument is fundamentally unserious.
In this short dispatch, we look at the evidence for 17 advanced economies since 1870. We simply ask whether, country by country, housing, bonds or equities have protected against inflation in modern history. In order to do that, we compute Spearman’s correlation coefficients, which are more robust measures of actual correlations than Pearson’s, of total returns for bonds, stocks and housing assets with CPI.
The evidence that emerges is unambiguous and, indeed, dispositive: across AEs and through the modern period that began with the second industrial revolution in Chicago c. 1870, housing is the only asset that has protected against inflation; bonds and stocks have not.
So, don’t believe everything you read on the FT, especially when it is not backed by any evidence. Now, I have to go barbecue some burgers. Happy Fourth of July!
Agree wit others. Could pull one or two decade slices, same graph for each? Has this changed?
Would be more convincing with additional starting dates of 1920, 1960, and 2000. Or rolling 60 yrmear averages.