Contributors: Nicholas Reynolds and Kristine Servando
Updated on January 7, 10:11 PM EST
What You Need To Know
It’s been a year of wild reversals in markets: bonds got burned and then rallied, stocks were cratered and then soared, and the all-powerful King Dollar of the first half erased all its gains in the second.
Traders and investors were buffeted by a succession of shocks: a US regional banking crisis and the collapse of Credit Suisse, the failure of China’s long-awaited economic rebound from Covid, the outbreak of a war between Israel and Hamas, and finally the Federal Reserve’s about-face to turn dovish.
While many of the early moves fizzled, there were some big winners over the year as a whole. Artificial-intelligence shares were red hot and dragged up chip stocks behind them, while the so-called Magnificent 7 — Tesla, Amazon.com, Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia and Microsoft — dominated US equity gains. The yen was the big currency loser with the Bank of Japan hardly budging from its super-easy monetary policy, while cryptocurrencies bounced back from their 2022 selloff.
What’s in store for 2024? Keep scrolling below to see what the experts are saying.
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Why It Matters
Here are some of the big questions for 2024:
Stocks: Can global equities keep rallying based on optimism over Fed rate cuts, or will the slowdown in the global economy end up being more severe than currently envisaged and sap demand?
Dollar: Is the US currency going to extend its recent weakness as the Fed moves toward cutting rates, or bounce back as the world’s largest economy outpaces its rivals?
Yen: Will Japan’s currency finally rebound as the central bank decides to bite the bullet and abandon the world’s last negative-rate regime?
Oil: What will happen to crude as wars reshape supply lines, OPEC+ pledges to reduce output and demand weakens from the world’s biggest energy importer China?
Cryptocurrencies: Can Bitcoin and its beaten-down counterparts extend their recent rally and re-ignite the mania seen in late 2021?
Flashpoints: Are we really set for a “soft landing” and is inflation truly vanquished? How will elections impact markets? Could global geopolitical relations deteriorate further? And how will markets respond to all those risks?
