Executive summary

• Investment markets fear long-term persistent inflation - Long-term inflation causes interest rates to rise and sharemarkets and commercial property markets to fall. To make matters worse, the real value of a dollar is falling as well. Persistent high inflation is something that is unambiguously bad for investors.

• Consumer price inflation not asset price inflation - We are only concerned with Consumer Price Inflation (CPI) in this Spotlight and, in particular, persistently high inflation - because short bursts of inflation do little damage to investors. On the other h...