Let’s get one thing straight—most people have not made real money in the market over the last 30 years. Yeah, sure, the S&P is up 575%. But compared to what? Gold? The dollar? Your groceries? You haven’t made real gains. You’ve ridden a mirage.
We’ve been sold a bill of goods for decades—diversify, buy the index, trust the system. It’s the gospel of financial media and fund managers who want you docile, buying every dip like a good little retail soldier. But if you strip out inflation—if you account for the actual purchasing power of your money—your portfolio hasn’t grown. It’s been flatlined.
And here’s the rub: the cause isn’t market volatility or investor sentiment…
It’s policy. It’s the Fed. It’s the central planners, those twelve unelected, myopic technocrats playing god with interest rates and money supply.
People like to blame capitalism for inequality, but what we have isn’t capitalism—it’s cronyism wrapped in a monetary policy disaster. The Fed’s manipulation of interest rates over decades hasn’t helped the average investor. It’s helped the institutions with first access to money—private equity behemoths like Blackstone, scooping up homes while teachers and first-time buyers get priced out by cash offers they can’t compete with.
And let’s not let politicians off the hook either. Whether it was Bush in ‘08 handing over decisions to Hank Paulson, or any other president outsourcing critical choices, the point remains: we’ve centralized too much decision-making power, and the result has been an unmitigated failure.
Milton Friedman turned economics into a numbers game—if you can run a regression, you can call it a relationship. It’s why Ivy League economists said there was a “free ride” in buying goods from China. They never bothered to ask what happens when those dollars don’t come back. It’s why they thought increasing the money supply would create growth. It doesn’t.
Growth comes from innovation, risk, and sound money. Instead, we’ve had inflation masked as progress. And inflation doesn’t help the average Joe (above or below average) it helps those closest to the money printer.
If you want to survive the next 30 years, the takeaway is simple: don’t be passive. Passive investing is a losing game. The data proves it. You need to be active. You need a framework. You need to understand markets beyond CNBC talking points.
This is about more than stocks and bonds. It’s about ideology. About realizing that centralized control—whether through monetary policy or economic dogma—doesn’t deliver prosperity. It redistributes it, usually upwards.
The market may look fine in nominal terms. But when you pull back the curtain, and compare it to gold, measure it in real terms, it’s all smoke and mirrors.
So what’s your plan? Keep diversifying into underperformance? Or start playing to win?
By Brandon Chapman, CMT
