A year to forget… Or remember!

I am about to write this article reviewing everything we have experienced from an economic point of view by analyzing all the headlines that have accompanied us in this challenging 2022.

A year in which the Perfect Storm occurred and the news got worse day by day.

We closed December 2021 celebrating the new normality and with a euphoria in the financial markets that indicated that 2022 would be the definitive exit from the CoVid-19 crisis and that we were going to get back to business as usual. 

However, January began with fears of a possible war in Europe, which would be confirmed weeks later after the announcement of Vladimir Putin’s invasion on February 20 of the same year. 

If January and February had left us with average falls of 8%* since the beginning of the year, March was not going to get any better as people began to talk about the “energy crisis” and all the problems it was going to cause, with inflation reaching a peak of 9.8%** in Spain, almost nothing! 

As a reference, we have to go back to June 2008 to see inflation in Spain above 5%. We have not only surpassed this figure, but doubled it in September of this year. 

All this volatility and instability in the markets resulted in an April with a 9% drop (exceeding in one month the drop we had experienced in January and February). This downward trend was aggravated by the Fed’s announcement of a rate hike in May, June and July, leaving us with a summer with a depreciation of -23% since the beginning of the year.

In all this maelstrom, negative news, uncontrollable inflation, a lingering war and the announcement that we would see a winter in which we would not be able to turn on the heating added to the negative news.

Now, reading this article, one might think that this year is lost and that it would be better to start talking about 2023. However, an optimist like me would try to identify some similar pattern and see the glass half full in these situations.

To try to identify something similar to what we are going through we have to go back to the 1980s where we had inflation above 13%***, market instability and the Soviet missile crisis.

In that decade, people who saw the glass half full and decided to take a step forward experienced one of the highest historical revaluations of +57%**** in 5 years and +182% in 10 years. These years presented opportunities that the good investor took advantage of and that the methodical saver used to increase his assets and build a good future. 

At this optimistic point, I would like to use Bobby Unser’s phrase: “Success is where preparation and opportunity meet”. I believe that after all these events we are more than educated and we have made an intensive accelerated financial training in these months; but additionally we are facing a unique opportunity with financial markets trading well below their usual levels. 

To finish seeing the glass half full, I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a 2023 full of personal and professional success. In short, I would like to remember 2022 as the year that once again put us to the test and we were able to pass with flying colors.

*      The index cited throughout the article is the MSCI World index as the leading global equity index. 

**     Source: INE.

***   Source: Macro data from the World Bank database.

**** Source: Own projection using Bloomberg data on the MSCI World index.