Is inflation really a threat?
According to historians, stocks have in the past been a good long-term inflation hedge. That means that stock prices, when measured over periods of many years, have tended to go up faster during periods of high inflation than when inflation has been low.
The investment lesson to draw: Knee-jerk investors who sell stocks because of the threat of higher inflation therefore set up good long-term buying opportunities.
The notion that stocks are a good long-term inflation hedge is not as counter-intuitive as you might otherwise think. When inflation is high, companies are able to raise prices and hence fatten their bottom line. By the same token, when inflation is low, firms' pricing power is correspondingly low.
In this regard, I note that - just as you would expect to be the case, given rising inflation in recent months - Standard & Poor's reported in Monday's edition of its newsletter, "The Outlook," that 71% of companies are planning to raise the prices of their products. This was the finding of a survey of 200 companies' chief financial officers conducted by Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business and an organization called Financial Executives International.
Investors who sell stocks when inflation rears its head are implicitly assuming that companies have no pricing power, and hence that their earnings growth rates don't change with inflation. But history shows that this is not the case, according to a study by Harvard economists John Campbell and Tuomo Vuolteenaho. They found that real (or inflation-adjusted) earnings growth, when measured over several-year periods, was relatively constant, and that nominal earnings growth fluctuated with inflation.
Study
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The mistake that investors make, therefore, is extrapolating nominal earnings growth rather than real earnings growth, a species of something that economists call money illusion or inflation illusion. So when inflation starts to rise, they erroneously believe that nominal earnings will grow as slowly in a high-inflation period as when it was low. This leads in turn to the mistaken conclusion that stocks are worth less because of the higher inflation............
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Now time to look for companies who have the greatest pricing power.