Macro
The backdrop the asset pages sit against: what prices have done to cash, whether pay has kept up with them, and what a house costs measured in gold rather than in a currency that inflates. Currencies are shown natively and never converted, and the same CPI series power the inflation-adjusted “real return” line on every DCA backtest.
British pound
UK CPI all items (ONS, D7BT) · 1988-01 to 2026-07
- Annual inflation (latest)
- 2.8%
- Prices since 2000
- +99%
- £100 kept as cash since 2000
- buys 50% less today
Annual inflation rate
Purchasing power of £100 held as cash
£100 left as cash in 2000 buys what £50 bought then. This series begins in 1988.
United Kingdom
Average weekly earnings, whole economy (ONS, KAB9) · 2000-01 to 2026-06
- Average pay now
- £755 per week
- Pay, last 12 months
- +4.0%
- Prices, last 12 months
- +2.6%
- Pay after inflation
- +1.4%
Annual growth: pay vs prices
Whenever the price line is above the pay line, pay was falling in real terms that year — however well it had done before.
Pay after inflation, set to 100 in 2000
Pay after inflation fell 11.8% from its Feb 2008 peak, and took 13 years to regain that level.
What your old salary is worth today
The charts above are averages. This is the same question asked of your own pay.
£58,811 is what you would need today to buy what £30,000 bought in 2000. Prices rose 96% over that stretch.
Average UK pay grew 141% over the same years. Had yours kept pace with it rather than with prices, you would be on £72,422 — which is 23.1% ahead of inflation.
Both figures are read at June 2026, the latest month covered by both series, and 2000 is that whole calendar year’s average — a salary is earned across a year, not in one month. CPI tracks a national average basket, so your own costs, and rent or a mortgage above all, may have moved very differently. These are gross figures: where tax thresholds have not moved with prices, matching the number above still leaves less in hand. And it says what standing still would cost, not what the job pays now.
United Kingdom — average home
Average UK house price (HM Land Registry UK HPI) · 1968-04 to 2026-06
- Latest price
- £272,188
- In gold, today
- 2.8 kg
- Dearest in gold
- 19.9 kg (2004)
- Cheapest in gold
- 1.9 kg (1980)
Price in GBP
Priced in kilograms of gold
Sources: US BLS CPI-U and average hourly earnings via FRED (public domain), UK ONS CPI and average weekly earnings (Open Government Licence v3.0), Eurostat euro-area HICP (reused with attribution), HM Land Registry UK HPI (OGL v3.0), Census/HUD median US sale price via FRED, and the LBMA Gold Price PM (administered by ICE Benchmark Administration). Figures as published; growth rates, purchasing power, real pay and gold ratios are derived from them.
The two wage series are different measures — UK weekly pay across the whole economy, US hourly pay for production and non-supervisory workers — so each is compared only against its own country’s prices, never against the other. Both are averages rather than medians, which higher earners pull upward. The euro area has no wage or house-price line: Eurostat publishes a quarterly labour cost index that returned nothing usable for the euro-area aggregate, and a house-price index rather than euro price levels, so neither can be computed honestly.