Key Takeaways Every year we pull together key takeaways so that our clients and colleagues can easily glean the key messages from our Outlook. The most consistent takeaway for more than a decade has been to stay invested with an overweight to US assets. While this takeaway has served our clients well, we also note that the past year has been full of surprises. US equities outperformed beyond our expectations. Chinese and other emerging market equities underperformed our bad case scenarios. Inflation increased much faster and sooner than we expected, as a result of which the shift in monetary policy in the US and UK also happened sooner than we expected. This year promises more surprises. We often underscore the difficulty, under the best of circumstances, of forecasting economic growth and asset class returns. And these are certainly not the best of circumstances. While we believe that our two key investment themes of “US preeminence” and “staying invested” will endure, our team has put forth this 2022 Outlook with an even stronger dose of humility than last year. Key takeaways from our 2022 Outlook are: • Above Trend Growth: We expect global economic growth to slow from last year but remain above-trend. • Less Uniform Monetary Policy: We believe some central banks, such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, will maintain their accommodative policies; some, like the People’s Bank of China, will become more accommodative; and others, such as the Federal Reserve and Bank of England, will tighten policy.
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Goldman Sachs
january 2022
