How does inflation affect personal wealth?
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Inflation just means that a given sum of money has less purchasing power, so it depends if the cash components on your balance sheet are assets (you have stuff) or liabilities (you owe money to someone).
So in general inflation helps people who own some form of capital but owe money, but hurts the people who lent them the money (if we’re only talking about wealth, obviously inflation can hurt wage earners whose wages are worth less now).
In US history you’ll here about the “Free Silver” movement that wanted to debase US currency because farmers owned capital (they could grow crops and sell them at whatever price level), but owed a ton of money to banks.
In the current economy there’s one other interesting twist: If inflation is high you prefer money now to money later (which will be worth less) with the result that high speculative stocks are much less attractive.
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