Belgium
What one unit of currency became
Invested in 1890 and held to 2020, after inflation. Equities ended at 108.0x, housing at 5448.6x, bonds at 12.1x and bills at 1.2x. 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 114 years in which all four assets were reported. 17 years inside the 1890-2020 window are missing at least one asset and are skipped, so the series is not an unbroken run of 131 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 | 3.33% | 4.79% | 21.83 | 150 | 1871-2020 |
| Housing | 6.72% | 8.75% | 15.19 | 120 | 1890-2020 |
| Bonds | 2.42% | 3.17% | 10.55 | 144 | 1871-2020 |
| Bills | 1.06% | 1.98% | 9.79 | 146 | 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. 16 observations are flagged by JST as interpolated and included. Methodology
Coverage for Belgium
Equities 151 years, housing 120, bonds 145, bills 147. JST flags 8 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.