Germany

What one unit of currency became

Invested in 1871 and held to 2020, after inflation. Equities ended at 310.8x, housing at 4127.7x, bonds at 75.7x and bills at 16.0x. 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 116 years in which all four assets were reported. 34 years inside the 1871-2020 window are missing at least one asset and are skipped, so the series is not an unbroken run of 150 years. Shaded bars are JST's own banking-crisis years. Methodology

Compound annual real return

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

An independent check on the safe rate

Two scholars, two sources, one quantity. The bill rate computed here, deflated by JST's price index, set against Schmelzing's independently constructed real safe rate for the same country-years. They are built from different underlying instruments and are not expected to match to the decimal; where they track each other, both are more credible. This check exists for eight countries only, because Schmelzing's country series covers no others, and it is shown where it exists rather than promised everywhere.

Source: Jorda-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database, Release 6 (Jorda, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick & Taylor) | Schmelzing (2020), Bank of England Staff Working Paper 845 Arithmetic mean of the annual real rate within each period, over the years both sources report. Periods split at the wars. Methodology