Do stocks protect against inflation? I sorted my portfolio
By The 11ish Collective · October 3, 2026
Elon Musk went on the Dwarkesh Podcast and said this about the US national debt:
“We are 1,000% going to go bankrupt as a country and fail as a country, without AI and robots. Nothing else will solve the national debt.”
I actually believe the thesis. Per the Treasury, the debt is about $40.17 trillion, the interest bill alone is now over a trillion dollars a year (more than the military budget), and the Iran war keeps adding to it (Yahoo Finance / Moneywise, Oct 3, 2026).
But every article like this ends the same way: buy gold. The one I read literally had a gold IRA ad sitting in the middle of it. I don’t want more gold. So I asked a different question: if this is true, do stocks protect me from it, or do they make it worse? Then I sorted every stock I own.
What “bankrupt” actually looks like for the US
If you borrow in a currency you can print, you don’t go bankrupt the way a person does. You pay people back in dollars that are worth less. That looks like inflation that won’t go away, interest rates that stay high, and a weaker dollar. So the real question isn’t “will America default?” It’s “what do I want to own while the dollar slowly leaks?”
Do stocks protect against inflation? Short game vs long game
| Kind of inflation | What stocks do | Real example |
|---|---|---|
| A sudden spike | Drop. Higher rates make future profits worth less today. | 2022: the S&P 500 lost about 18% including dividends. |
| Slow and steady, for decades | Win. You own real businesses whose prices and profits rise with everything else. | Over long stretches, stocks have beaten cash and bonds after inflation. |
| A long 1970s-style grind | Roughly break even after inflation. | The Dow was near 1,000 in early 1966 and still below 1,000 in mid-1982, while consumer prices roughly tripled. |
So stocks DO offset inflation, but only if you can sit through the first punch. Poker version: inflation is a long session, not one hand. If you can’t survive the bad run, the long-run edge doesn’t matter.
And it matters a lot WHICH stocks you own. “The stock market” isn’t one thing here.
The 3 questions I asked about every stock
- Can it raise prices without losing customers? If yes, inflation mostly passes through to you.
- Is its debt fixed and long, or floating and big? Inflation shrinks fixed debt in real terms. Floating debt eats you alive when rates stay high.
- How much of its value is years away? The further out the profits, the harder higher rates hit the stock, even when the business is fine.
My portfolio, sorted into 5 buckets
These are the stocks I hold as of October 1, 2026. A few I’m in the middle of selling are left out, and sizes stay private. This is how I read each one, not a list of what you should buy.
1. Inflation is their revenue
If prices go up, these companies’ sales go up with them. This is my non-gold inflation hedge.
| Ticker | Company | Why it holds up |
|---|---|---|
| CVX | Chevron | Sells oil. When oil spikes, inflation and its profits rise together. |
| COP | ConocoPhillips | Same bet as Chevron with more exposure to the oil price (no refining). |
| FCX | Freeport-McMoRan | Copper miner. Copper is a real asset priced in dollars. |
| CB | Chubb | Reprices policies every year and earns more on its float when rates are high. |
| AIZ | Assurant | Same insurer math: reprice, then earn on the float. |
| AJG | Arthur J. Gallagher | A broker paid a cut of premiums. Premiums inflate, so its commissions inflate. |
| SCHW | Charles Schwab | Earns more on client cash while rates stay high. |
| ICE | Intercontinental Exchange | Runs the Brent oil futures market, and volatility means volume. Its mortgage-tech arm is the weak spot. |
| V | Visa | Takes a cut of every swipe. Prices go up, the swipes get bigger, and it carries no loan risk. |
2. They can raise prices
Not helped by inflation, but they pass it on to customers who keep paying.
| Ticker | Company | Why it holds up |
|---|---|---|
| LLY | Eli Lilly | Patented drugs set their own price. The risk is politics, not inflation. |
| MRK | Merck | Same. Keytruda losing patent protection in 2028 is the bigger risk. |
| JNJ | Johnson & Johnson | Drugs plus devices, with one of the strongest balance sheets in the market. |
| MDT | Medtronic | Devices hospitals can’t skip. |
| BSX | Boston Scientific | Same, and its growth runs faster than inflation. |
| EW | Edwards Lifesciences | Heart valves. Pricing power is strong, but no dividend and a growth price tag make the stock rate-sensitive. |
| DHR | Danaher | Sells the consumables labs reorder no matter the price. |
| BTI | British American Tobacco | Smokers pay the price increase. A classic inflation stock. |
| PG | Procter & Gamble | Brands that raise prices, but volume is flat as people trade down. |
| HONA | Honeywell Aerospace | Parts and service for planes already flying. Airlines pay what it costs. |
| CMCSA | Comcast | Raises subscription prices every year. Losing broadband customers is the risk. |
| LVMUY | LVMH | Luxury raises prices, and rich buyers care least. Demand has been soft, though. |
| PCAR | Paccar | Truck maker that prices well, but it’s cyclical. |
3. Mixed: helped one way, hurt another
| Ticker | Company | Helped by | Hurt by |
|---|---|---|---|
| JPM | JPMorgan Chase | Higher rates widen lending margins | A squeezed consumer means more bad loans |
| C | Citigroup | Same | Same |
| CFG | Citizens Financial | Same | Same, as a regional bank |
| COF | Capital One | High card rates | Card holders are the first to crack |
| SUI | Sun Communities | Lot rents rise with inflation | REIT prices fall when rates rise |
| VMRK | Vivmark | Apartment rents reset every year | Same rate problem |
| PPG | PPG Industries | Raises paint prices | Oil is its raw material |
| APD | Air Products | Contracts pass costs through | Heavy debt |
| KDP | Keurig Dr Pepper | Brands with pricing power | Lots of debt |
| DG | Dollar General | People trade down to it | Its core customer gets hit hardest by gas prices |
| SPOT | Spotify | Has raised prices without losing users | Valued on profits years out |
| LHX | L3Harris | Defense budgets keep growing | Fixed-price contracts eat cost inflation |
| ARLO | Arlo | Growing subscriptions | Small company selling to squeezed consumers |
4. The AI bet: Musk’s “fix”
These win if Musk is right and AI and robots grow us out of the debt. They’re also the first ones a rate spike hits, because most of their value is profits years from now. Nine tickers, ONE bet.
| Ticker | Company | What it sells into AI |
|---|---|---|
| MU | Micron | Memory chips. The most cyclical stock I own. |
| AMD | AMD | AI chips, priced on profits years out. |
| INTC | Intel | Chips made in US fabs. I hold it partly as a Taiwan hedge. |
| AMAT | Applied Materials | The tools that build chip fabs. |
| CIEN | Ciena | Optical gear that links data centers. |
| GLW | Corning | Fiber for data centers (and Gorilla Glass). |
| WCC | Wesco | Electrical gear for data-center builds. |
| HPE | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | AI servers and networking. |
| JCI | Johnson Controls | Cooling for data centers. |
5. Hurt by higher rates
| Ticker | Company | Why it gets hurt |
|---|---|---|
| DTE | DTE Energy | Regulated utility. The rates on your power bill reset slowly, it borrows a lot to build, and the stock trades like a bond. |
| AEP | American Electric Power | Same, with a huge data-center build to fund. |
What sorting it told me
- My account is already a barbell. The AI “fix” sits on one side, and oil, insurers and Visa sit on the other. If Musk is right, bucket 4 carries me. If he’s wrong and the dollar leaks, bucket 1 does.
- The scary scenario is AI disappointing while inflation sticks. Then buckets 4 and 5 get hit at the same time, and that’s 11 stocks moving together.
- The weak spots are the bond-like stocks: utilities and REITs. They own real assets, but the market prices them off interest rates.
- No gold needed. Buckets 1 and 2 do the job gold is supposed to do, and they pay dividends while they wait.
If you want to sort your own
If you own stocks and this thesis worries you, run each one through the 3 questions above and drop it in a bucket. Then count. If most of what you own lands in buckets 4 and 5, one rate shock hits almost everything at once, and that’s worth knowing BEFORE it happens, not after. And if you think I put one of mine in the wrong bucket, tell me. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Disclosure: Steve holds every stock named in the tables above as of October 1, 2026. No payment was received for this post. This is commentary, not investment advice.
Sources: Jing Pan, “Elon Musk: America is ‘1,000% going to go bankrupt’,” Moneywise via Yahoo Finance, Oct 3, 2026 (Musk quote from the Dwarkesh Podcast; debt, deficit and interest figures from the US Treasury as cited there). S&P 500 2022 total return and Dow Jones Industrial Average history from S&P Dow Jones Indices; consumer prices from the BLS Consumer Price Index. Company reads are from our own reviews of each company’s 2026 reports.
Written by Steve. Edited by Steve.
