A Framework for Inflation-Adjusted Valuation under Dynamic Economic Conditions

Inflation steadily reduces the value of money, and with it the assurance that tomorrow’s funds will mean what they do today. Anyone dealing with long-term commitments, governments issuing bonds, insurers planning payouts, or families saving for retirement has to confront this gap between the numbers on paper and what those numbers will buy. The usual present value formulas assume that inflation stays fixed at a single rate, but this is a convenient fiction rather than a reflection of reality. In practice, inflation changes with economic policy, financial markets, and even demographic forces, sometimes gradually and at other times in sudden, disruptive bursts. This paper develops a framework for valuing future funds when inflation is neither constant nor predictable but variable and occasionally stochastic. We extend traditional formulas to handle both discrete and continuous inflation paths and establish theoretical results on their behavior, including monotonicity, bounds, and convergence properties. To bring ideas to life, we combine real-world data with controlled simulations to show how even modest changes in inflation can dramatically change long-horizon outcomes. The analysis speaks to practical concerns about retirement planning, insurance, and sovereign debt, while also suggesting directions for more robust forecasting.