| > personal savings Buy I-bonds and TIPS. The more inflation there is, the more money these instruments make. They are literally the "bet on inflation" play. The problem, in the past 10 years, is that inflation has been historically low. So TIPS and I-bonds were a bad play. Turns out that this year, they were a good play. > startup cash Buy futures in the commodities that affect your business. If you need a bunch of orange-juice, then buy orange-juice futures. If the price of orange-juice rises in the future, you sell your orange-juice futures (which now have gone up with the price of orange-juice), and use all your extra money to buy the orange-juice you need to keep your business running. --------- Both problems have been solved decades, even centuries ago. That's why we have a futures market / commodities market. The opposite also is a problem: in a deflationary market (ex: Price of Lumber falls), you want to sell futures before the price falls. A lumber mill will sell futures while the price is high, knowing that they can make all the lumber people want, and hoping that speculators will give them money. Locking in good prices for the items you manufacture is the entire point of the futures market. ------ Futures market is also gamed by warehouses / storage. For example, if oil prices are in contango (oil today is more expensive than oil tomorrow in the futures market), the oil-suppliers will sell off their oil-reserves today (lowering the price of oil today, making room for cheaper oil tomorrow). If oil prices are in backwardation (ie: oil today is cheaper than oil tomorrow), the oil-suppliers will buy up oil-reserves (increasing the price of oil today, filling up their warehouses in preparation for the more expensive oil prices tomorrow). |