Inflation hedging characterizatics of gold, real estate and stocks under fiat monetary system

Abstract

Inflation is an inevitable part of the current economic and financial system. While the rates of inflation might be different among countries, depending on the management of the economy, one thing common about inflation in various countries is its persistency. The persistency of inflation can only be due to the continuous increase in the money supply at a rate higher than the production of goods and services, which is a common feature of the fiat monetary system that the world economies have adopted today. Faced with continuous inflation, individuals and businesses are forced to hedge against inflation by investing in various assets, rather than keeping their wealth in the form of cash. The current study adopts OLS analysis and cointegration techniques to test gold, real estate and stocks as a hedge against inflation, using quarterly data of six countries for the period from 1991 to 2008. The assets are selected as proxies of both real and financial assets while countries are selected with the objective of presenting countries with different rates of financial and economic development in order to analyze and compare the performance of each asset as a hedge against inflation. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that gold is a good hedge against inflation in most of the cases as compared to real estate and stocks. It performs well as an inflation hedge in both developed and developing economies, but in long run only. Real estate, on the other hand, presents a good inflation hedge in developing countries and mostly in the long run, while stocks as a hedge against inflation performed well in developed countries and mostly in the short run only.