we were talking about bonds (or I guess annuities) in the previous message. Debt, essentially.  If you owe money at a fixed interest rate, an increase in the rate of inflation helps you very directly, and hurts your creditors very directly, because you get to pay your debt back with cheaper dollars.<p>If you really expect your real-estate to exactly follow the CPI, I expect you will be disappointed.  (or maybe excited... for the last two decades, at least, real-estate has massively outpaced inflation.)<p>Pensions, and really, most things are more complex, just &#x27;cause there&#x27;s usually something that attempts to compensate for inflation, but the point being that in general, inflation is good for debtors and bad for creditors.   Most of the historical arguments in favor of inflation run along the lines of a partial repudiation of debt.   Go read Bryan&#x27;s &quot;Cross of Gold&quot; speech for an especially punchy example.