Introduction

One of the most important variables that investors have been carefully watching and trying to predict in the past few months is inflation. The massive rise money supply to avoid economies from plunging into a deflationary depression has led market participants perplex about the potential consequences in the medium to long term. We have seen that uncertainty over inflation expectations have already started to surge significantly since March as more and more investors are convinced that inflation will eventually surprise the market and start to rise unexpectedly.

Inflation is an important variable for asset allocation as some risk off assets may start to perform very poorly if we see a surge in prices. Figure 1 shows three different measures of US inflation in the past 25 years: CPI, core CPI and core PCE (CPI is more volatile as it includes more volatile items such as food or energy). Even