Whatever role low interest rates and high government spending may have played in helping economies to stabilize during the recent global recession, they now have companies, investors, and policy makers alike on the lookout for inflation to come roaring back. Some economists are already warning of a return to the levels of the 1970s, when inflation in the developed countries of Europe and North America hovered at around 10 percent. That’s not uncommon in Latin America and Asia, where emerging economies have seen double-digit inflation for many years.

At first glance, the effects of inflation on a company’s ability to create value might seem negligible. After all, as long as managers can pass increased costs on to the customer, they can keep inflation from eroding shareholder value. Most managers believe that to achieve this goal, they need only ensure that earnings grow at the rate of inflation.

Yet a closer analysis reveals that to fend off inflation’s value-destroying effects, earnings must grow much faster than inflation—a target that companies typically don’t hit, as history shows. In the mid-1970s to the 1980s, for instance, US companies managed to increase their earnings per share at a rate roughly equal to that of inflation, around 10 percent. But to preserve shareholder value, our analysis finds, they would actually have had to increase their earnings growth by around 20 percent. This shortfall was one of the main reasons for poor stock market returns in those years.