Notes on the Week Ahead

As one year ends and another starts, I often think about a personal balance sheet for the year gone by and make some resolutions for the year ahead. For myself and our own family, 2023 was a pretty good year, particularly relative to the pandemic-scarred years at the start of this decade. As for resolutions, apart from the usual healthy-living aspirations, I am determined to spend less time looking at screens and more time looking at faces.

This is also a good time for investors to review the balance sheet of economic and investment performance for 2023 and make some resolutions for the year ahead.

As winter weather envelops the homes of New England, our thoughts naturally turn to warmer days and maybe a beach house on Cape Cod. Of course, if you intend to rent such a house for a week next summer, it’s pretty much a roll of the dice. You could get lovely weather or it could rain every day. However, if you plan to buy a beach house on Cape Cod, you really only need to understand the climate. The sunny summer days will far outnumber the wet ones.

One of the least pleasant aspects of winter is driving on icy roads as the snow piles up in front of you. Long experience has taught us that winter driving is possible. But it is slower, with a narrower margin for error, and a greater chance of sliding off the road.

Similarly, if we extend the economic forecast horizon to encompass not just 2024 but also 2025, it’s still possible to trace out a “soft-landing” scenario, whereby the economy keeps growing even as inflation returns to the Fed’s 2% target. However, it would be, at best, slow-going and, like driving into a worsening snowstorm, there is a rising risk of the economy sliding into recession.

Last Wednesday, the University of Michigan released its final reading on consumer sentiment for November, with the index coming in at 61.3, up from its flash reading but down from October and worse than 92% of monthly sentiment readings since 1978. Meanwhile, the “misery index” for October, calculated as the sum of the unemployment rate and the year-over-year CPI inflation rate, came in at 7.1%, better (or that is to say, lower) that it has been 79% of the time over the same period. We continue to have a bottom decile attitude about a top quartile economy.

This general gloom may account for part of the recent buildup in retail money-market funds which have risen by almost 50% over the past year to over $2.2 trillion. While some of this is the result of outflows from bank deposits, much of it represents long-term savings that investors are unwilling to commit to long-term investments.

If you do a quick google search on the phrase “tensions rising”, you get 230,000 hits. If you search the phrase “tensions falling” you get 3,700 hits. One of the cardinal rules of journalism is to only report on rising tensions and never improvement.

However, in recent weeks, there has been a quiet decline in tensions across a number of dimensions. This is being matched by falling inflation pressures and signs of moderating economic growth. After a turbulent few months, the economy seems to be back on the soft-landing track, a path that should support both the stock and bond markets and also allow the dollar to resume its stalled out decline.

One almost unnoticed innovation in our modern world is the tracking app. Whether you’re booking a car service, enduring a long flight or just waiting for a pizza, with a click or two, you can find out exactly how long it should take the car, flight or pizza to reach its destination. These apps are useful for planning purposes and provide a level of reassurance that you are, in fact, headed to where you should be headed. A similar monitoring of the downward path on inflation can provide some reassurance that inflation is, indeed, on track to hit the Fed’s 2% target ahead of schedule.

On August 16th, 1858, the first telegraph message was transmitted across the Atlantic on a cable newly laid on the ocean floor. The line speed was slow and the cable failed a few weeks later but it was a start. By the late 1860s, a second cable, made of better material, was in operation and telegrams began to be sent more regularly, cutting the time required for transatlantic communications from weeks to minutes.

“We just came for one thing, too”.

Sari and I were meandering toward the checkout in a crowded Costco on Saturday morning and I was reflecting out loud on our accumulation of a substantial and diverse pile of goods, although we had come to buy just one thing. But we were not in the same league as the woman who’d overheard me. She may have come for just one thing too, but the lower rack of her cart was loaded, the little area at the front for babies or purses was full and the main body of the cart was stacked so high above her line of sight that her daughter was helping direct the vehicle to a checkout lane. Clearly the next innovation in cart design needs to be the installation of a periscope.

Investors in the week ahead will likely be most focused on the aftermath of the terrible attacks in Israel over the weekend. The consequences of this violence are, of course, first and foremost a human tragedy for all the families affected and they are in our prayers at this time. However, an initial rise in the dollar and oil prices in response to these attacks serves as a reminder of the potential for conflict in the Middle East to impact the global economy and investors will need to keep a close eye both on the evolution of the conflict and its economic implications.

In an idealized world of medical practice, you would go to the doctor, describe a few symptoms, undergo a few tests and then listen carefully to the doctor’s diagnosis, prognosis and prescription. The diagnosis might well be due to something entirely out of your control and the prescription would often be a pharmaceutical. However, very frequently, the prescription would be in the form of advice on life-style changes. In an idealized world, you would take that advice and implement it.