2024: Key Risks for Individual Investors
What to watch out for if you want to avoid unpleasant surprises
No one likes negative surprises when it comes to their money. But right now, the world is not exactly in its calmest state, and the rest of 2024 will likely not be much different. That can present an opportunity for savvy investors who know how and when to take advantage of the big changes happening around them. But political turmoil, rearrangement of global economic ties, policy changes, and related market swings can also test individual investors and their portfolios, sometimes to the extreme. Let us talk about what to watch out for as this year progresses.
As the first month of 2024 showed us, even with inflation receding globally and central banks considering normalizing their policies, economic troubles still persist in many countries. China, the world’s second-largest economy, is in the midst of real estate turmoil and needs to resort to additional measures to stem the outflow of capital and the plunge in its stock market. Germany, Europe’s manufacturing engine and largest economy, is still struggling to recover from its industrial decline, construction recession, and the global fall in demand for exported goods and services. The US is growing strongly but its internal political polarization spells out a turbulent election year ahead, while its regional banks which have been…
