Australia
What one unit of currency became
Invested in 1901 and held to 2020, after inflation. Equities ended at 1321.5x, housing at 836.0x, bonds at 8.7x and bills at 3.8x. The scale is logarithmic, because over a century of compounding a linear axis would flatten three of these four lines into the floor. The dashed line is 1.0: below it, the asset lost purchasing power.
Source: Jorda-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database, Release 6 (Jorda, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick & Taylor) Compounded over the 117 years in which all four assets were reported. 3 years inside the 1901-2020 window are missing at least one asset and are skipped, so the series is not an unbroken run of 120 years. Shaded bars are JST's own banking-crisis years. Methodology
Compound annual real return
| Asset | Real return | Excluding the wars | Volatility | Observations | Span |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equities | 7.18% | 7.68% | 15.59 | 150 | 1871-2020 |
| Housing | 5.77% | 6.09% | 11.73 | 120 | 1901-2020 |
| Bonds | 1.78% | 2.05% | 9.02 | 121 | 1900-2020 |
| Bills | 1.85% | 2.17% | 4.38 | 147 | 1871-2020 |
Source: Jorda-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database, Release 6 (Jorda, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick & Taylor) Nominal returns deflated by JST's own consumer price index. No observation for this country is flagged as interpolated. Methodology
Coverage for Australia
Equities 151 years, housing 120, bonds 121, bills 148. JST flags 2 banking crisis years for this country, marked on the chart. An average taken over a short series is a weaker statistic than one taken over a long series, and the counts are here so you can tell which you are reading.