One of the most difficult investment disciplines to master is to learn from one’s experience but not to over-learn. It is human nature to give greater weight to those things one has experienced and less to the experience of previous generations. Inflation is one of the most fundamental of investment concepts. Its effects are extremely pervasive and hard to avoid. Yet chronic inflation is a very modern phenomenon. For most of British history, periods of falling prices are as common as those of rising ones. One reliable estimate puts prices at the beginning of the first world war as little changed from Samuel Pepys’s day. Nor was this confined to the prices of goods and services. The Moyse’s Hall museum in Bury St Edmunds has the deeds of a Suffolk farmhouse which was sold in 1924 at the depths of the postwar agricultural depression for the same price as it