Join Ben Miller, CEO of Fundrise, and co-host Cardiff Garcia for a unique kind of retrospective: Ben and Cardiff look back at their very first episode together, where they discussed how to evaluate and plan for different eventualities in the economy, and update their outlooks, now that eight months have passed in a very eventful year. As Ben describes it, this kind of “scenario planning” involves considering how likely things are to stay the same, take a turn for the worst, or change in a manner that is truly unpredictable.

In this episode, the main variable in Ben and Cardiff’s conversation is the ongoing, historically high inflation that has driven so much of our macroeconomic lives since the start of the year. Ben explains that understanding inflation is key because it helps us in turn understand how the Fed will behave in attempting to tame it, mainly by adjusting interest rates. As Ben succinctly puts it, as an investor, “you can’t fight the Fed.”

So, join us as our hosts talk through ten specific inflationary drivers, in an attempt to better understand whether these drivers will, optimistically, lead to inflation eventually coming to heel, or, pessimistically, break a critical piece of our economic infrastructure. These ten drivers include:

  • Goods and manufacturing
  • Housing
  • “The Wealth Effect”
  • Geopolitical Relations
  • And much more.

Finally, hear Ben revisit some of the ways the Fundrise portfolio prepared for the economic turbulence that has defined 2022 so far.