Financial Markets – What to expect in 2012?

The year 2011 has been another unexpected horrific roller coaster ride for financial markets due to financial and political condition all around globe. We still got few more weeks left and don’t be surprised if adds more fuel to the fire. Usually winter is quite with not much surprises, but this year has been exception and market is taking the toll especially due to economic conditions in Europe.

We are going to complete the fifth year of a financial crisis, and investors really want some good news for 2012 with global recovery. But we all know, Europe is still trying to right itself, joblessness stays high in the U.S., and China’s ability to escape the malaise in the West remains an open question.

With this volatile background, we have to see how year 2012 is going to shape up for investors. Luckily we got analyst and experts who does nothing but forecast and market anlaysis for their existence. Last week one of those kinda of report was published by Business week Tom Keene’s. Here is the snapshot of the Econochat which might helps to shed some light on what to expect for 2012.

  • Credit Suisse’s chief economist sees uneven recovery, dangerous joblessness, and struggling central banks. For 2012, I think the U.S. is likely to have a persistent recovery—inadequate in scale, choppy, mixed in terms of sectors—but nonetheless persistent growth. I think China is in much the same circumstance. Europe is the other big block. There, I think you have to anticipate that they’ll have no growth at best for the early part of the year and potentially, of course, something more severe than that
  • J.P. Morgan’s Bruce Kasman on the U.S., The bank’s chief global economist says, its 3 percent growth for the third quarter. For this time next year, it all depends on policy. If we don’t change the fiscal path we are on and we allow all the tax cuts to expire and the other spending to expire, we will have the economy skirt recession but grow at something like a 1 percent pace. And then where we are next year I think depends a lot on how Europe manages its problems. If we can avoid the fiscal tightening, if we can kind of switch from having near-term tightening to more medium-term adjustments and keep fiscal policy neutral, I think the economy could do O.K. here—I would say 2 percent, 2.5 percent growth
  • Barclays’s Julian Callow on Europe, The bank’s head of international economics explains how dangerous a Greek default would be and why Germany can’t bail out Europe.

    Why should Americans care about the resolution of the euro crisis? If you go to your average person, say on Main Street U.S.A., before the crisis, they might not have heard of Bear Stearns. But you can be sure they would have heard of Greece. If Greece is having a substantial default on its debt, that is very big news. And we cannot really predict exactly what the consequences of that will be in terms of confidence through the global financial system. We have had defaults historically from Argentina, from Russia, but this is a much more significant event.

I don’t see a very optimistic view from any one of them. It is not their fault, obviously things happening in recent months made every analyst to be calculative in their expectation. Last year same time, we all expected some growth and recovery in 2011. We did have some good news for the first half of the year after things starts to go back to worse. So now most of them are taking cautions approach in predicting the market.

With high unemployment, US Election year, Europe crisis still unresolved, Arab upraising and unsettled situation and mother nature adding her part starting this winter early and expect to be worse, we are sure to witness another interesting year. With lot more wild rides ahead, just take it slow and take some good holiday time off so you all can get ready to buckle up next year.

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