Fear is never a good advisor.

This applies in real life as well as in the stock market.

The monster now lurking under the bed goes by the name of inflation.

And that makes investors in the stock markets very nervous, you could almost say: fearful.

The nice thing about the stock market is that you can even measure this fear quite rationally.

There are various indices for this, such as the VIX in the United States.

Franz Nestler

Editor in business.

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    The VIX expresses the expected fluctuation range of the broadly based American S&P 500 index.

    Option prices are used for the calculation.

    And this week the index jumped from less than 17 points to more than 28 points - an increase of around 70 percent at the top.

    By Friday afternoon, the index had calmed down again to around 22 points, but is still strong at 40 percent.

    This is also the highest level since the beginning of March.

    Nervousness has also increased on the German stock exchanges, albeit not as much.

    The VDAX-NEW, which measures the nervousness of the DAX investors, jumped 45 percent upwards to be 30 percent higher on Friday afternoon than at the beginning of the week.

    This is of course also expressed in the prices: The German share index DAX lost 1.1 percent this week and was quoted on Friday afternoon at 15247 points.

    This enabled it to recover significantly from its weekly low of 14816 points, when it was at times almost 4 percent in the red.

    But what about the monster under the bed, the inflation that sent prices down this week?

    The stock exchange traders were startled by the surge in inflation in the United States: In April, inflation rose by 4.2 percent, after plus 2.6 percent in the previous month - i.e. above the inflation target of 2 percent.

    Central banks are calm

    The US Federal Reserve, for example, is still assuming that the sharp rise in inflation in the United States is only temporary and suggests that the economy will pick up.

    If, on the other hand, inflation turns out to be permanent, the central banks must intervene and tighten monetary policy.

    Interest rates could then rise again.

    This is not a problem as long as it is below economic growth or inflation.

    Investors on this side of the Atlantic also expect monetary policy to be tightened prematurely.

    Therefore, they parted with government bonds.

    This drove the return on ten-year federal securities to a two-year high of minus 0.096 percent at times.

    ECB President Christine Lagarde also considers the increase to be only temporary here.