Stocks? Bear market, economy could be heading to recession.
Real estate? Interest rates up, possible recession, prices could crash.
Bonds? Interest rates going up and likely going much higher, horrible for bonds.
Gold, gold miners, etc.? These are going down given the risk of recession.
Are there ANY assets one can (relatively) safely park one's cash? If you just leave it cash you get raped by inflation.
This really freaking sucks.
It's a little unclear whether you are looking to invest / long term trade (ie: assume risk in exchange for potential profits) or just protect capital as best as possible with minimal risk.
If you are good at short term trading, there are obviously opportunities there.
If you have an opinion on the future that you would like to express, there are obviously lots of ways to bet that rates will continue to go up, that equities will continue to deteriorate, that we'll see prolonged stagflation, etc, or any other prediction you may have.
Since you don't talk about a firm prediction for what will happen and taking advantage of it (you list some predictions but without the conviction to trade them), I suspect you are looking for something as safe as possible for a portion of your assets. Perhaps you allocate a certain percentage of your capital to various categories, including long term safety, and trade with the rest. I don't know.
I honestly think the safest you can get is CDs and you eat the loss on inflation. In other words, if you're looking for long term SAFETY, you lock in a small purchasing power loss due to inflation being higher than the return on the CD. Some countries also have inflation-indexed certificates (I'm not in the USA). For me (not USA), that would be ~8% inflation - 4% on a 1 year CD = -4% loss.
Of course, inflation could turn out to be better or worse than 8% over the upcoming year, so even that -4% isn't risk free and ideally I would have a good prediction on the future path of inflation.
And yes, for safely preserving capital without relying on being able to accurately predict the future (and accept the risk entailed), inflationary environments suck.
Edit: If you can get a loan for an asset that isn't likely to deteriorate in value (eg: certain types of real estate, perhaps) and you have cash flow that is somewhat indexed to inflation (eg: a job with a reliable expectation your salary will rise to match inflation) then the cost of the loan payments depreciates relative to your purchasing power. Reading your post, though, I suspect this involves more predictions than you really want, but in inflationary environments this can be lucrative when done carefully.
