Owning equities (through index funds) is one of the best ways to always beat inflation. They are the part of the economy that appreciates because of future returns, in future money, not past dollar amounts.

That said, most of current CPI "inflation" is not economy wide price increases, but comes from 1) car prices, because car manufacturers massively messed up and production is way down for the past two years, and 2) energy, which is from several global market issues. There's also housing, which is not in CPI, but that's also easily attributable to underproduction of housing since 2008 (and probably even for decades before that, honesty).

We are actually in incredibly good economic times, especially considering the massive destruction that the pandemic has wrought, and in the US, the lowered number of workers due to years of reducing immigration. I am glad people are not overly exuberant, but I with they were focused on the things that mattered more.

But most of all, the insane amount of money printing that went on during the pandemic.

If that were the case that too much money was printed, then one might expect broad economy wide price inflation, but instead it's really focused only in areas that have supply bottlenecks.

But too much money printing wouldn't cause the major auto manufacturers to majorly underproduce less than they typically do, and it wouldn't cause energy to go up. Of the 5.5% "excess" points of inlfation, the breakdown of cost areas is:

2.1 vehicles (of which 1.6 is used cars)

1.8 energy

0.7 food

0.6 housing

And except for food, there are clear supply bottlenecks there. For food, beef farmers have been complaining about monopsony from meat processing plants for more than a decade. There's likely a small amount of rentierism going on there. As there is for the housing crunch. (Though housing also takes a long time to respond to changes in demand patterns, such as the one induced by the pandemic)

That's the story for many decades now. It turned out wrong every time.

See for example: https://ritholtz.com/2019/08/death-of-equities-40th-annivers...

Very true. On the other hand, it was previously believed that the real estate market could never go down, which led to highly leveraged positions in that market from homeowners to banks.

Seems like the solution to the turbulent world we are in certainly isn't pick your own stocks or YOLO on crypto.

What does a broke person who will not be able to pay off their student loans for decades and who will never be able to afford a house care about being slightly less broke? Your life is a painful grind either way where you're just barely staying afloat. If you're stuck in poverty barring a risky long-shot hitting, then it's entirely logical and rational to take big risks with the little you do have.

The real problem isn't that stocks or crypto or any other financial tools exist, it's that so many Americans lack reasonable hope and opportunities for a better future outside of seeking out things that seem unthinkably risky to many people here.

Why not go to Vegas and play roulette then? At least there you know exactly what your odds and payouts are and there isn't a massive information asymmetry.

I just don't think saying "Don't put your money in ETFs where you can get returns of ~10% a year for 40 years barring mass catastrophe" is particularly valuable. Even someone putting 83$ a month into an SP500 index can expect to make almost 400K over 40 years. Whereas I would expect a person yolo'ing 1000 a year on random shitcoins and memestocks to lose $40K over 40 years.

Maybe I'm crazy but I think if you can find 1000 a year to throw away on pure gambles surely its a far better choice to invest that in something that's virtually a sure thing on long time scales?

Everyone is looking for get rich quick schemes which frankly short of starting the next Instagram in your basement simply don't exist.