What to Use to Combat Inflation
The pandemic over the past couple of years was the first time I, as an ordinary person, really felt the sting of rapid inflation—prices jumping up fast. Friends in Shanghai felt it even more sharply (freight costs, product prices, and especially the cost of daily necessities all surged).
So how should everyday people deal with inflation?
Over the last decade, home prices in China’s tier-one cities went up tenfold. Our broad money supply has been growing at more than 10 percent a year, and in many years it hit 15 percent. From 1998 to 2016—or was it 2017?—China’s broad money supply expanded fourteenfold.
When people talk about core assets, rising housing prices, gold, and commodities, flip the question around: why has so much money been printed?
Back in the days before fiat currency, these things were considered equivalents of money. Today we call them hard currencies, and the whole point of hard currency is to hedge against inflation.
Hard currency, or money equivalents, are basically raw materials.
What Are Inflation Plays?
Inflation plays refer to publicly listed companies that ride the wave of rising prices and profit from inflation.
For example, agricultural products make up about a third of China’s CPI. That means farm prices have a big impact on CPI, and when CPI climbs, it usually signals higher food prices.
Other key drivers of CPI and PPI include nonferrous metals, precious metals (gold), oil, coal, and natural gas, cement and building materials, shipping, fertilizers and animal feed, plus sugar, alcohol, and other food items. In an inflationary environment, these sectors tend to see futures and spot prices climb, which lifts product prices and boosts corporate profits.
Based on past episodes of high CPI, the biggest winners have been companies in nonferrous metals, gold, oil and coal, potash fertilizer, sugar, and liquor.
Smart investors saw this coming and started piling into these sectors back in early 2020, betting that the pandemic wouldn’t end quickly and would fuel inflation. If you missed out, you likely paid a steep price in 2021 and 2022.
Learn from history and allocate some assets to protect yourself against inflation.