The period of high inflation in the 1970s prompted researchers to carefully examine the relationship between inflation and stock returns and to look for ways to avoid unexpected inflation. The year 2022 brought back inflationary pressures to the U.S. economy not seen in more than 40 years, and this has spurred new efforts to answer long-standing questions about inflation and asset prices. Authors from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2023) bring a fresh perspective on this topic, and their paper allows us to get a FED insider’s view on the ageless question of how inflation affects equity returns.

What happens to the stock prices when inflation expectations decrease or increase? The authors Manav Chaudhary and Benjamin Marrow, in their paper Inflation Expectations and Stock Returns, explore this topic and find that when inflation expectation is high, stock prices also rise in their value. The evidence they present suggests that stocks have been a hedge against expected inflation for the last couple of decades and that this effect is present across stocks from all industries.