US inflation hit its highest level since the 1990s in October and has now reached a rate that, historically, has coincided with very poor stock market returns. Notwithstanding the uncertainty around the impact of the “Omicron” variant of the coronavirus, we don’t expect inflation to stay at quite such high levels, so we aren’t among those calling for a stock market crash driven by high inflation, or a decade of negative real returns like we saw in the 1970s. But we do think investors are underestimating the chance that inflation remains high enough to put the brakes on the stock market’s gains, which we think will be underwhelming over the next few years.
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