You’ve heard it again and again. More times, probably, than you care to by now: Between the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the 2020s ushered in a macro regime shift. An epoch, if you like.

The pandemic forced reluctant hands on fiscal policy, particularly in developed markets where the crisis-fighting burden fell too often (which is to say always) on central banks from 2008 through 2020.

The post-GFC, pre-COVID period was defined by monetary largesse and (relative) fiscal restraint. The result was a notoriously slow, incomplete recovery with worsening inequality as central bank support accrued to Wall Street and generally failed to bolster Main Street.

The silver lining (if you can call it that) was that the less-than-robust nature of the GFC recovery translated into a disinflationary macro environment. So at least Main Street didn’t have to suffer the injustice of sharply high prices.

The COVID response, by contrast, found governments showering the populace with money — transfer payments of various sorts. That was the right idea initially, but it ended up being too much of a good thing, particularly in the presence of supply constraints.

The result was classic “too much money chasing too few goods and services” in 2021. As night follows day, a sharp increase in inflation ensued.

Insult to injury was the war, which drove up energy and food prices, exacerbating inflation dynamics. By mid-2022, most advanced economies were staring at runaway price growth, forcing central banks to respond with panicked rate hikes and balance sheet shrinkage.

There are any number of ways to encapsulate all of that in chart form, but the figure below, from this week’s installment of BofA’s popular “Flow Show” series, is both concise and poignant.

As you can see, we’re witnessing pronounced outperformance for raw materials over bonds, where “pronounced” means in excess of 8% on a 10-year rolling, annualized basis, nearly the most since the 1970s.

“[The] GFC caused monetary excess and fiscal austerity — bonds smoked commodities in the era of secular stagnation,” Michael Hartnett wrote, recapping the story told above. “But COVID caused fiscal excess [and eventually] less monetary excess” which, when taken with de-globalization, meant “commodities smoking bonds in the 2020s era of political populism and inflationary growth.”

Some market participants, Hartnett went on, suspect “all the commodity charts will look like gold [if] Trump runs it hot, oil bounces and China keeps the yuan cheap.”

In case you aren’t picking up what he’s laying down: A chart of gold shows a near vertical inflection. If all commodity charts eventually look like that, well… that’d be something wouldn’t it?