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Real interest rates are still massively negative and will not change much if our total 2022 hikes are 1%. It seems like monetary policy will result in financial

• nostrademons 5y ago
  Personally I think the answer is "all of the above", at different timescales. Long-term, I'm betting that it'll end in hyperinflation. But on the short term, asset prices tend to track nominal interest rates better than real ones, because investors have a hard time correctly predicting the effect of inflation on an individual firm's cash flows. (We saw this in the 1970s, where P/Es compressed from about 20 to about 8 in response to higher interest rates, but company profits also rose with inflation, so when interest rates normalized in the 80s stock prices took off.) So if the Fed raises rates, asset prices could crash by 50% or more, which may trigger them to drop rates again, which further pumps inflation and raises stock prices, which causes another cycle of tightening, etc. Expect things to get messy, and less predictable than they were before. The long-term trend is toward a worthless U.S. dollar and infinite stock prices, but there could be a lot of ups and downs before then.