Practical analysis for investment professionals
04 June 2018

Inflating Equity: Inflation’s Impact on Financial Statements and ROE

You turn on the financial news channel one morning to find the S&P 500 has soared past the 2800 mark. Stock reports indicate ongoing bullishness and you realize you have the opportunity to make more money if you go overweight in equities. Then this thought process abruptly stops.

You begin to question whether the market will rise higher or if it’s losing momentum. Inflation concerns crop up in daily stock analysis as well as the leading inflation gauges — the Producer Price Index (PPI), the Consumer Price Index (CPI), jobless claims reports, the unemployment rate, etc. You are afraid that you will invest at the top of the market and overpay for the equities in question, which would be tantamount to lower expected returns.

This is where an understanding of financial statement analysis helps. Ultimately, it is the return a firm earns on its equity that drives the share price, and inflation suppresses equity returns.

Subscribe Button

Investors who don’t understand accounting and finance are like hunters with blurred vision: They are playing a fast-moving game they will ultimately lose.

Financial statements prepared for reporting purposes combine accrual accounting, management estimates, and managerial judgment and offer critical insights. But when applied to financial analysis, they have two recurring problems:

  1. Accountants rely on the historical cost assumption, and accounting book values seldom equal market values.
  2. Accountants don’t recognize unrealized gains and losses or imputed costs, so accounting income differs from economic income.

Hence, financial statements are at best an approximation of economic reality.

Inflation, simply put, is a rise in the general price level of an economy. On the macro economic front, inflation reduces the supply and increases the demand of loanable funds, causing interest rates to rise. The interest rates thus reflect future inflation, and the stock market tends to move inversely with interest rates.

Tile for Puzzles of Inflation, Money, and Debt: Applying the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

From a micro economic standpoint, inflation distorts a company’s income statement in three distinct ways.

First, historical cost depreciation understates the true decline in the value of assets and thereby overstates reported earnings and income taxes due. Second, the cost-flow method adopted for inventory valuation affects the reported net income in different ways. First in, first out (FIFO) valuation during periods of high inflation overstates reported earnings and taxes. On the flip side, last in, first out (LIFO) valuation, while matching current costs to revenues, understates the inventory and thereby overstates the return on assets (ROA). LIFO accounting thus induces balance sheet distortions when it values inventories at original cost. This results in an upward bias in the return on equity (ROE), which is defined as the net income available to common shareholders/average common shareholders’ equity, because it undervalues the investment base on which the return is earned. Despite this shortcoming, LIFO is preferable to FIFO in computing economic earnings.

The third distortion is reflected in the impact of reported interest expense on company profits. Because of inflation, the historical interest expense is overstated, as the value of debt decreases due to inflation, which results in reported earnings being understated and consequently a decrease in taxes owed.

Financial Analysts Journal Current Issue Tile

ROE measures the efficiency with which the firm employs owners’ capital. Management has three levers for controlling the ROE:

  1. Earnings per dollar of sales or profit margin.
  2. Sales per dollar of asset employed or asset turnover.
  3. Amount of debt used to finance the assets or financial leverage.

The net profit margin ratio, or net income/sales, reflects the company’s pricing strategy and its ability to control operating costs. Companies with high profit margins tend to have low asset turnovers and vice versa. The asset turnover ratio, or sales/assets, measures capital intensity, with a low asset turnover indicating a capital-intensive business and a high asset turnover the opposite. The nature of a company’s products and its competitive strategy help determine the firm’s asset turnover. ROA helps measure how efficiently a company allocates and manages resources.

Companies with a high proportion of fixed costs are more vulnerable to declining sales. Businesses with predictable and stable operating cash flows can safely take on more financial leverage than those facing more market uncertainty. Firms with low ROA generally employ more debt financing, and vice-versa.

As a measure of financial performance, ROE has three deficiencies:

  1. Temporal analysis: ROE necessarily includes earnings for only one year, so it frequently fails to capture the full impact of longer-term decisions.
  2. Valuation divergence: A high ROE may not be synonymous with a high return on investment to shareholders because of possible divergence between the market value of equity and its book value,
  3. Risk ignorance: ROE scrutinizes only the return and ignores the risk associated with generating those returns.

Tile for T-Shape Teams report

A critical first step in company analysis is to determine the industry distribution of the firm’s revenues and at what stage each major industry segment is positioned in the industry’s life cycle. Second, investors must understand that earnings per share (EPS) = ROE x book value per share. So the growth of net income per share can result from an increase in the return on stockholders’ equity, an increase in stockholders’ equity per share, or both.

After piecing all the financial information together, investors must determine what kind of future growth rate the company can sustain over the next five to 10 years. A firm’s sustainable growth rate is the maximum pace at which its sales can increase without depleting its financial resources. It is nothing more than the company’s growth rate in equity. Put another way, growth rate = retention rate x ROE.

Mature and declining companies often invest considerable resources in new products or firms that are still in their growth phase. If managers, creditors, and investors base their decisions on historical cost financial statements, inflation reduces a company’s sustainable growth rate. If they adjust for inflation, it has comparatively little effect on the sustainable growth rate.

Historical cost accounting tends to understate long-term assets and overstate long-term liabilities on the balance sheet. Also, inflation increases the amount of external financing required and the company’s debt-to-equity ratio when measured on its historical cost financial statements. Inflation distorts the reported earnings figure and overstates true economic earnings. Hence the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio drops.

A company’s P/E ratio depends on two factors:

  1. Future earnings prospects.
  2. The risk associated with those earnings prospects.

Trust Study Tile

The P/E ratio therefore reflects the market’s optimism about a company’s growth prospects. When growth opportunities dominate the estimate of total value, the firm will have a higher P/E ratio. In general, the P/E ratio gives little information about the company’s current financial performance.

When the expected rate of inflation is low, the earnings yield, or EPS/price, on stocks should exceed the yields to maturity on bonds. When the expected rate of inflation is high, the reverse should be true. A bright future, a high stock price, and low earnings yield go together.

Investors should focus on the ROE as it is impacted by EPS, which in turn determines the sustainable growth rate and finds its way into the price of the equity security through the P/E ratio.

As Abraham Briloff observed, “Financial statements are like fine perfume: to be sniffed but not swallowed.”

And that’s worth keeping in mind the next time you consider overweighting equities.

If you liked this post, don’t forget to subscribe to the Enterprising Investor.


All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Image credit: ©Getty Images/Photo by Stuart Gleave


Professional Learning for CFA Institute Members

CFA Institute members are empowered to self-determine and self-report professional learning (PL) credits earned, including content on Enterprising Investor. Members can record credits easily using their online PL tracker.

About the Author(s)
Gaurang Trivedi, CFA

Gaurang Trivedi, CFA, is an independent investment and management professional providing advisory services in forensic analysis, equity research, private capital, corporate finance, and business development. He has over 28 years of experience in the finance industry in equity research, private equity, functional management, commercial banking, internal audit, and project management. He has an MBA from Rutgers Business School as well as master's and bachelor's degrees in commerce from the University of Mumbai. He is a CFA charterholder since 1999 and has also qualified for the CMT, CMA, CFM, and CTP certifications.

13 thoughts on “Inflating Equity: Inflation’s Impact on Financial Statements and ROE”

  1. Kirk Cornwell says:

    Yes, “inflation” is commonly measured by the price level of goods, commodities, and financial assets but isn’t it ultimately the amount of currency in circulation (therefore holding the potential for larger, rapid changes in those price levels.) For equities, the question is whether an “inflation” in excess of nominal planned price increases will trigger panic buying or selling. In the early ‘70’s, the market went south.

    1. Gaurang Trivedi says:

      Kirk, thanks for your reading and comment. Monetary measures will provide signals for “perceived” inflation in the pipeline, whereas price levels give “factual” inflation data points. Moreover, you have presented a “Top-Down” view, whereas the article is “Bottom-Up” in orientation.

      1. Prath says:

        Mr Trivedi,
        Thanks for the insightful article, but your comment on Kirk’s query is ambiguous for me. Be it a top-down or bottom up approach, shouldn’t the results converge? Moreover when you say”Monetary measures will provide signals for “perceived” inflation in the pipeline, whereas price levels give “factual” inflation data points.”, do you mean inflation is detected but not quantified in the former but it is , in the latter. Also, what’s your view on how the market reacts to inflation:(as Kirk mentioned) does it sell more or buy more or does it depends on other factors like demographics and developing or developed economies

        1. Gaurang Trivedi says:

          Prath, thank you for your probing inquiry. Isn’t convergence an ex-post analysis with a “Time Value of Money” consequence of action or inaction based on “perceived” versus “factual” data? Main street behavior is affected by prices paid for goods and services purchased rather than expectations of those prices, which may or may not materialize. No company, industry, sector operates in isolation or is affected by a solitary factor. As is with everything, there is no one-size fits all. Investments should be triggered based on expected returns on equity and my article attempts to emphasize that notion.

  2. Mark A Roberts says:

    There are a number of longitudinal studies showing that equities have generally been a partial hedge against inflation as has real estate. I would have liked to see a discussion on why that tends to occur using the financial measures used in this article. Using these macro views of the company, I haven’t been able to show the inflationhedg factor of equities what I have found when looking at micro unit pricing analysis of the income statement.

    1. Gaurang Trivedi says:

      Mark, inflation pass through is a management decision which may be dependent upon company competitive position, customer/product price elasticity, industry maturity, substitute product availability, compensation policy, stage of business cycle, macro economic growth conditions among others. Perhaps your sample data is reflecting the end result of these decisions at the micro level. If ROE is maintained at nominal prices, there is a case for hedge against inflation. At the investment portfolio level, you will have to observe the inflation differential in the return of investment to arrive at a conclusion regarding the efficacy of the investment and the asset class as an inflation hedge.

  3. Peter says:

    “The interest rates thus reflect future inflation, and the stock market tends to move inversely with interest rates.”

    Doesn’t this tendency depend to an extent on the absolute level of interest rates at the time of the increase, though? See Reinhardt and Rogoff.

    1. Gaurang Trivedi says:

      Tendency is a behavioral aspect. Current absolute level of interest rate is abnormally low compared to historical levels. As such some inflation in the pipeline should not have material impact on investor psychology. However due to “anchoring” (where low inflation and resultant interest rate level become the norm) any perceived increase is immediately and adversely reflected in investor psychology and decision making. Anchoring makes absolute level a relative concept.

  4. I don’t understand what you mean in this specific paragraph:

    “The third distortion is reflected in the impact of reported interest expense on company profits. Because of inflation, the historical interest expense is overstated, as the value of debt decreases due to inflation, which results in reported earnings being understated and consequently a decrease in taxes owed.”

    Do CEOs or analysts care about past interest expense in the context of forward looking analysis, where you’re trying to figure out what the impact may be on XYZ company going forward?

    And if the focus is forward looking in emphasis, then please explain to me why interest expense would be getting bigger (wouldn’t that depend on whether your debt is structured as fixed or floating?).

  5. Gaurang Trivedi says:

    Stefan, your cited paragraph is analytical and forward looking. Should CEOs care about past decisions? Absolutely! Analysts should also be looking at past decisions to assess managerial quality. Furthermore, past decisions find their way into Book Value, a metric mostly ignored in modern day “forward looking” financial analysis. Since value of historical debt decreases due to inflation (forward looking), any structuring of historical debt would result in higher interest expense (again forward looking), unless the floater was negatively correlated.

  6. duong trong thang says:

    nature of business is competition. we analyze financial reports to realize competitive advantage and to invest.

    from this basic rule, we analyze many other things to realize competition. I want CFA program talks more about competition.

  7. Habib Affes says:

    Accuracy is clear
    Need more sector examples

  8. john says:

    The current inflation rather starkly revealed that some companies owned real options to raise prices well in excess of costs. For investment selection, identifying those in advance would have been helpful. For such a company, historical analysis and adjustment of margins might veer to the low side.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *



By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.

Close