[coned88]

> I think it's better to correct for inflation. The money supply can grow and it doesn't necessarily cause inflation (see the 2008 monetary response to the Great Financial Crisis as an example).

I may be a layman but I'm pretty sure that was just one type of inflation.

> I'm not sure this is true. In the 70s, inflation was high and stock returns are low. In the 90s, inflation was low and returns were high. In 2021, inflation was high and returns were high.

I'm not exactly talking about returns. I mean prices. In my eyes when you look at the S&P 500, every time there's money printing it's like a rolling snowball. It just gets bigger and bigger. But it's weird because that growth itself is not reflective of companies doing things but just them investing money or buying back stocks.

[svachalek]

I think there's a subtle bit that a lot of people don't see about the stock market, that it's trading dollars for bits of companies. This says something about the value of those companies, but also about the value of dollars. I think a lot of what we've seen over the past two years makes little sense if you think about it in terms of the value of American companies, but from the perspective of the value of a dollar (to those who have easy access to them) it's all a lot more logical.