Finding yield in a zero-rate world is making life tough for fixed income investors, and inflation is only making the job more difficult.

Purnima Puri at HPS Investment Partners is deploying three strategies to get returns for her clients as price pressures continue to mount, a situation that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday he is finding “frustrating.”

“If you’ve got that kind of a environment where people need to buy yield, they’re kind of searching for the least negative real yield, I would argue,” Puri said Wednesday during CNBC’s Delivering Alpha conference.

Puri shared the sentiment of Elizabeth Burton (chief investment officer at Hawaii’s Employees’ retirement System), who said that U.S. Treasurys have negative real yields, accounting for inflation, and she does not intend to own them.

She instead outlined three types of fixed income that she is currently investing in: floating rates. These are loans to companies with high debt levels. Shorter-duration high-yield credit and noninvestment grade credit with high risk premia.

Puri, her firm’s director and manager of public credit strategy portfolio management, said that she believes those three options offer some protection against inflation.

Due to capital depreciation, which occurs when prices rise as rates fall, inflation lowers the fixed income’s value.

Puri said that she can see Americans returning to the U.S. as interest rates rise because so many other countries offer very low yields.

Fed officials are insisting that inflation, which is running at a 30-year high, is transitory due to factors brought on by the pandemic. Burton disagrees.

“I have never thought it was transitory. “I’ve been talking to inflation for the last year and a quarter,” she stated. She said, “I believe that there are some things that have gone down that are only temporary. … But I think a lot of the things … like home prices, I don’t see signs of that falling.”

Burton indicated that she owns stocks right now. She said it is primarily in defensive and high quality sectors.

We must own equity. “I don’t know how anybody can achieve their goal over the long-term without having equities,” she stated. I wouldn’t be obese and would choose carefully.

Puri stated that she considers inflation a danger and doesn’t think the Fed raising rates will reduce it.

According to Puri, “I expect that inflation will occur and currently it is being driven both by growth and by supply chain problem.” Is it possible to solve supply chain problems?” If you are unable to solve the supply chain issues, it is not obvious that increasing rates will help to curb inflation.