I’ve been working on an alternative way to think about inflation, and I’d like this sub to poke holes in it.
CPI answers a useful question about consumer prices. But as an investor, I’m also interested in a different question: how much harder has it become to acquire assets that might preserve or, better yet, grow purchasing power?
I’m calling the measure COST, for **Cost of Getting Ahead**. It tracks the dollar cost of a fixed basket of assets over time. The point isn’t that it should replace CPI, or that every asset price increase is monetary inflation.
So here’s what I’d genuinely like to know from value investors: **What would such a measure need to do before you’d consider it useful? And what would make you dismiss it outright?**