Back when I took some financial analysis classes in the early 00s, the topic of inflation came up. It’s pretty obvious but most people don’t realize inflation affects the stock market too. If the stock market is up 5%, and inflation is 7%, then the stock market actually went down 2%. I remember asking the professor why we don’t hear about “inflation-adjusted stock market returns”. He basically said don’t worry about it, it’s so low and consistent that it doesn’t really matter. At the time that made sense - inflation hadn’t been an issue in over 20 years. So nowadays, you have people who see “the stock market grew 10% last year!” and don’t realize that with high inflation, that’s not really very good. Because for most of their lives, it wasn’t something they really needed to figure out when looking at stock market returns.

It’s kinda the same with housing prices. I have seen analyses that show, as much as it feels housing prices have been going way up, when you factor in inflation home prices aren’t actually that far out of alignment. It’s just that inflation has been that bad and wages haven’t kept up. I’d be curious to see an analysis of stock market returns adjusted for inflation since COVID. I suspect it ain’t all that great.