“What about 8% or higher, which is probably what the real rate might be.”
In the 70’s my father would say, “As long as the Prime rate doesn’t go above 10% business will do fine” The number changes all the time, the strategy changes with it, it’s all relative.
Inflation is the bugaboo that’s been around all our lives. It’s the great excuse to claim one can’t get ahead. You’ll hear it from every “water cooler expert” with no money. And yet, some people have always “gotten ahead” while others never do. The people are the issue, not inflation.
Pick whatever number you like, my job is to make money faster than it inflates as much as possible. The number itself is irrelevant.
I’ve dealt with what people today would call extremely high inflation for most of my life. There have always been ways to outrun it and hopefully that won’t change. If inflation was that harmful I would never have gotten anywhere, and I’d be in the same shape as those “experts”.
Remember in the early 1980s 30 year bonds had 12% coupons or higher.
——“water cooler expert” -——
Although I have been “retired” for a long time, I have occasion to visit corporate offices where people are busily at their computers. Many if not most now days have two monitors.
Water coolers are dusty, unused, and certainly no longer a place for conversation.
Water bottles are the norm
At one large office I visit, the conversation place now is the very large wireless printer. Everybody prints documents there and then when somebody prints 20 copies of a 10 page document, a back log of workers lined up to fetch their document ensues.
Hugo Stinnes, now he was a guy positioned for wealth generation