Via Saxo Bank:
We’ve delved deep again this year in penning our annual list of 10 Outrageous Predictions. As usual, we roam the world and ride roughshod over consensus in sniffing out these supposedly highly unlikely events with underappreciated potential – events that could have tremendous implications if they come to pass. Enjoy!
2017 was supposed to be the year of volatility. We entered the year with existential concerns in Europe ahead of key national elections, US policy concerns due to bull-in-the-china-shop President-elect Donald Trump, and Chinese policy concerns as markets eyed October’s 19th Party Congress. All in all, it seemed as if this would be the year we would see more a more rambunctious monetary policy impulse and more dramatic gyrations in global markets.
Instead, the EU elections went off smoothly on balance while the European Central Bank’s supply of quantitative easing morphine kept Continental equities on a pleasant high despite a sharply stronger euro.
In the US, Trump floundered from one scandal and gaffe to the next, entirely failing to pull any policy levers that impacted markets even as he took personal responsibility for a stellar year in equity markets with record low volatility.
In Asia, China’s desire to keep everything orderly until at least the other side of the Party Congress kept fears of a renminbi devaluation on ice and the economy in reasonable shape even as the country’s dangerous credit bubble inflated further.
In short, with few exceptions, global risk assets enjoyed a very good year with very low volatility – the kind of year very few predicted and thus an outrageous one indeed, especially for bears and gold bugs. Who would have thought that, 12 months after the 2016 Election Day earthquake in the US, a classic fear indicator like gold would be near-precisely unchanged!
Our suspicion is that the complacency and low volatility in 2017 will not repeat and may indeed have stored energy for a spectacular and outrageous 2018. Thus, a number of our predictions point squarely at the risk that this accumulation of excess complacency may have blown a pent-up bubble of volatility.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Dec 8, 2017.