>Can you expand a little bit on why real estate is bad during times of inflation? And why only when RE rates are higher?

Real estate is great during times of high inflation, if you can lock in the interest rate below inflation. If interest rates and so are your loans, then real estate sucks; do you want to buy a new house when rates are 20%? What will that do to the real estate market?

The problem with real estate is even the time as it's increasing. The stock market is about it's future cash flows. With rates increasing, that's lower profitability, and reduced projects.

Flipside, it seems the north american governments aren't willing for houses to crash again. The last time was bad enough? Did we really fix the debt problem from last time though?

>"Debt locked in at rates below inflation" seems to tie into real estate. You could get a 2% ish mortgage right now, even though inflation's running at 6-8% Seems a great way to devalue the debt quickly, provided you've bought something that holds its value with the money you've borrowed.

There's your problem. As rates increase, housing typically decreases because the central banks are pretty bad at this prediction thing. Not so transitory inflation now is it. Modern Monetary Theory is now a hypothesis, it's an attempted theory that blew up. So which way does things move? Currency probably going to be running much hotter than any downward pressure by them raising rates.

>"With inflation high it seems rents are likely to go up so your mortgage payments become a decreasing percentage of your rental income."

Oh ya, this is going to be a thing. Dont forget all the immigration coming and has been happening. Canada for example is likely to receive significant numbers of ukrainian refugees. It doesnt seem popular at all to be anti immigration. A ton of people suddenly want to live in north america and I don't blame them.

>Pensions: not just low, medium, high. My pension lets me pick specific funds, so I've always picked things categorised as "high risk" equity index funds that aim to track things like FTSE all share or S&P. Is that still just the best option?

Sounds good to me, but I'll throw it out there. The gamestop situation is a thing. The USA has a rather unique situation that is being exploited bigtime. You cant deny that it is, https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/shedding-light-on-dark-po...

The damage will be mostly contained to the USA when this goes off, but are you in the USA or invest in US stocks? or through proxy of your stocks become exposed to this? Also what happens if it just never breaks? Obviously the banks can't afford to give infinity money. What happens if the banks win? They will win won't they... oh shit.

>Is that still just the best option? Do we still just assume that over a decent timeline the general market is still going to go up, so keeping in the market is better than messing around, even if there are down periods. And pound cost averaging means you get some benefits from the dips too.

Not at all. Here's a plausible scenario that goes down in december/january.

USA goes to vote at midterms and they vote like 70% republican. The entire map is red. Day 1 they appoint Trump as speaker of the house. Day2 they impeach Biden, Day 3 they impeach Harris. American civil war 2022-2023 starts. The democrats thought Trump cheated first time around. Trump thought Biden cheated(he did admit this in a "gaffe" - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-admit-voter-fraud/ feel free to watch the video that they link right there) and then republicans in 49 states submitted bills to make changes to how they vote which the democrats called restricting people's right to vote. It's war right... there's no way around it.

What do you think your stocks, even if you have absolutely minimal exposure to the use, will do? The global economy craps and we all hurt.