[logfromblammo]

Likewise, you can't show the effect of inflation on numbers where the effect of inflation has been explicitly removed.

If I buy an equity at $100 a share, and I sold it at $110 a year later, and got $1 in dividends during that year, I earned 11% on it, without accounting for inflation. There are two effects that may occur due to inflation. First, the $111 I now hold can only buy an amount of stuff that could have been purchased for $106 the previous year (or the amount of stuff that cost $100 then now costs $105). The second effect is that someone close to the monetary authority, perhaps a government agency or one of their contractors, could outbid someone else for that $110 equity, because they have newly inflated money.

The return remains the same. The ownership of the equity is different. Without the monetary inflation, someone could have bid a lower amount for the equity in order for me to achieve the same real rate of return. The equity does not cease to exist. It does not perform more poorly. It does not change its own length if the measuring stick is now longer. Those who benefit most from the monetary expansion (i.e. those who can spend the new cash first) can more easily afford to take ownership of it from those who benefit least.

Do you understand now why real rate of return is irrelevant to the value extracted from the economy via monetary expansion? Some fraction of corporate dividends are now going to different people. They do not grow or shrink based on who gets them.