The challenging thing about inflation is that it's very, very difficult to predict, especially when investors haven't experienced it in their adult lifetime. 

There's a lot of structural factors that have driven inflation and that were in place well before the pandemic. And I think about those in two overarching buckets, the first one being a reduction in the global labor force. 

So if we think about what has really driven our access to low cost labor, and therefore low cost goods, has been access to Southeast Asia manufacturing and Eastern European labor and manufacturing. And that has really subsided over the past several years. 

The second bucket is around CapEx spending. The lack of investment in the supply chain over the past decade has really been underappreciated. And along the same lines, CapEx spending in the energy sector, with the focus on ESG and climate change-- so every incremental dollar that is in play is not being spent towards CapEx, but rather towards returning capital to shareholders and towards low carbon initiatives. 

Many of the disinflationary factors that were driven by globalization over the past several decades have reversed trends. If we look at the access to cheap labor, and therefore goods, through the globalization, that has really been turned around, while globalization has been slow to take place. We foresee that accelerating over the next couple of years. 

While we understand that there is a tight labor force that's in play right now, we try to understand why that is. There are a lot of people that are still working. But they're working fewer hours, and they're working fewer jobs. And the wild card there really is the trends with regards to automation and digitalization. 

When the breadth and depth of inflation became more broad reaching as it permeated out into transportation, recreation, housing, shelter, it became more concerning. And now it's embarking upon this delicate balance between raising rates to a point where it curtails inflation, versus to a point where it stunts growth and induces a recession. 

Inflation protection has been underinvested and under owned in people's retirement portfolios. And so we believe that there is merit in having a strategic allocation to inflation mitigation assets, or assets that grow with economic growth. 

It's really important to understand the dynamics between growth, inflation, and rates as they interplay off of one another. And looking at our current macroeconomic environment, inflation is high, and we believe that it will remain structurally high-- perhaps not at that 8% level, but somewhere in the status quo rate of around 3%. 

We believe that growth can still remain above trend, and rates will be determined depending on the Fed's path. In that type of environment, we believe that real assets should continue to do well.