I have a medical malpractice annuity that pays out every month and goes up 2% compounded every year. I live in another country where cost of living is way lower than in the US and am worried that rapid inflation in the US or just overall instability will lead my annuity to be practically useless. Are these worries baseless?
Living overseas, I’d say your biggest worry should be the strength of the US dollar - strong dollar, lots of local currency; weak dollar, less local currency.
The dollar gets a lot of its historical strength from the combination of big country untouched by wartime destruction and being the global reserve currency. Being the reserve currency is a huge but hard to quantify factor, because it means that every major agent on the planet buys dollars, even if they don’t want to buy or sell goods in the US. It’s the reason the dollar gets stronger during global crises. China and Russia have tried for years to shake that reserve currency status and get the world to shift to something else for denominating international deals. Basket of BRIC currencies. Renminbi. Even Euros. Current administration’s isolationism may help those efforts, but it would be an enormous international reconfiguration to make that big a change, and isn’t likely to happen because of one four-year administration.
US inflation will tend to devalue the dollar - inflation and exchange rate are kind-of correlated, over relatively short time periods, but economic growth is more important over the long term.
That’s what I was worried most about: the devaluation of the US dollar due to American isolationism and tarriffs.
I’m assuming that if there will be domestic unrest (something along the lines of the troubles, or even a civil war/secession), the strength of the dollar will crash pretty quickly. Is this a decent assumption?