Weekly Market Summary.

As you can see from the accompanying table, over the week equity markets were little changed. However, of more interest is the fact that it was this time last year that equity markets began to fall as coronavirus, which until then was seen as being contained in Wuhan, started to spread outside of China.

Thankfully the brouhaha about an imminent return of inflation – and with it, tighter monetary policy via higher interest rates – didn’t last very long!

Unfortunately, you can’t always get what you want – but thankfully we did get the next best thing from the Bank of England’s monetary policy meeting this week: negative UK interest rates are viable and if the economic outlook weakens then the BoE is ready to take action.

For us, the main story of the week was the US Central bank’s monetary policy meeting.

As you can see from the accompanying table, US equity markets welcomed Joe Biden as the new president with a strong week.

While Donald Trump’s impeachment grabbed the headlines this week, it had absolutely no impact on equity markets as Donald Trump’s Presidency naturally comes to an end next Wednesday (20 January 2021) with the inauguration of Joe Biden.

While it was a historically depressing week given the scenes of protesters storming Capitol Hill in Washington, coupled with the surging coronavirus cases (resulting in tighter lockdown restrictions) around the globe; at the same time it was a historically upbeat week for equity markets…

The champagne corks weren’t exactly popping as it was a quiet end to a horrible year – and one that we are pleased to see the back of.

Overall it has been a ‘nothing week’. We had high hopes on Brexit negotiations, US fiscal stimulus talks and monetary policy meetings at the major central banks, but all effectively turned out to be non-events.

Global Equity markets held up for most of the week, but with no breakthroughs on a new US fiscal stimulus package or post-Brexit trade relations, they closed the week broadly lower.