I have left the workforce to be my own Clown of Wall Street. Thank you for your concern.Right - so the inflation-adjusted return is dependent on stable currency, hence our interest in inflation. You sound poor.
Taxes factor heavily into your real rate of return.
All this inflation and currency crap you guys are on about, still there is money to be made. You can't do anything about the current conditions, but you can adapt to them. High inflation and interest rates are great for non-meme banks and insurance. Several other sectors are doing great too. There will never be all blue skies for investments, there is always some shitstorm brewing. Right now there is inflation and whatever else. Before that we had Covid. Even before that, Donald Trump and his retard buttmonkey Peter Navarro could have had us all broke by going at a trade war with China. That easily could have had the U.S/world GDP down by several percentage points and we would have been eating cold gravel for breakfast. Luckily the Chinese agreed to buy four cargoes of soy beans. BIG WIN!
When everyone is done whining about interest rates, there will be something else.