Historical Asset Class Returns: The 100-Year Scorecard
Historical asset class returns since 1928 for nine investments, from small caps to T-bills, and why only three of them grew faster than the money supply.
Topic
Money Supply: Measuring Assets Against M2
The money supply is the yardstick for everything in our research, and these two articles show it most directly.
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Part I covers 1926 to 2026, when US M2 grew from about $43.7 billion to nearly $22 trillion, a 503-fold rise that leaves a 1926 dollar at less than one-fifth of a cent of the total pool.
Part III restarts the clock in 1928, the first year with reliable data for every asset class, and from there M2 grew 473-fold. Putting gold, housing, farmland, oil, government and corporate bonds, T-bills, small caps and the S&P 500 on that one scale is what let us see that only three of them came out ahead.
- 503x M2 growth, 1926 to 2026 The break-even multiple used in Parts I and II.
- 473x M2 growth since 1928 The break-even multiple on the Part III scorecard.
- $47,300 $100 invested in 1928 What it needed to become just to keep pace with M2.
Articles on Money Supply
2 articles from our research on this topic.
Plain-English definitions
Key terms for money supply
- M2 money supply
- The Federal Reserve’s measure of cash, current accounts and easily accessible savings in the US. We use it to see how quickly new money is being created.
- M2-adjusted value 1.0 = break-even
- An asset’s growth divided by M2 growth over the same years. Above 1.0 it gained share of the money pool, below 1.0 it lost share.
- Normalised to 1.0
- Setting every asset to the same starting value so growth can be compared on one chart regardless of the original price.
- Monetary dilution
- The loss in each dollar’s share of the total money pool as new money is created, whatever happens to shop prices.
FAQ
Questions about money supply
Answers drawn from the figures in our research. Educational only, not financial advice.
How much has the US money supply grown?
From about $43.7 billion in 1926 to nearly $22 trillion in 2026 in the Part I data, which is a 503-fold increase. Measured from 1928, as Part III does, the figure is 473x, and the series overview, using the June 2026 reading of $22.8 trillion, puts it at 522x. The differences come from start and end dates rather than from the data disagreeing.
What does $100 from 1928 need to be worth today?
About $47,300, just to hold the same share of the money supply it had in 1928. That is the number we used in Part III to check every asset class, and most of them fell short. Gold reached roughly 210x, farmland about 242x and US real estate 56x, while only small caps, the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested and, just barely, Baa corporate bonds got past 473x.
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