Peter Garnham, Editor at FX-MM
The end of the year and the start of a new one is as good a time as any to look at the state of play in the markets.
True – and as a number of authors of yearly reviews and previews that have landed in my inbox have pointed out – it really is a rather arbitrary cut off point. Economic trends and market moving events don’t follow the calendar after all.
Take the dollar, it really was a year of two halves for the greenback with Federal Reserve tapering propelling strong gains over the last few months of the year and making it the stand-out performer of 2014. A great deal of the research that I have seen suggests that market watchers believe that trend will continue into 2015.
But of course it always pays to be wary of consensus thinking. On that basis, there would be little point in staging the World Cup or running The Derby. And if the financial crisis has taught us anything it is that the future is, er, particularly tricky to predict.