Today we are going to discuss the 3 themes we believe have a better than 50% chance of influencing our capital markets during 2024. 

You might ask – why this is important? 

In a market environment with abundant uncertainty, it is important to be prepared for any number of shifting environments.   And with current U.S. and global debt levels, at some point, the shifting environments will be more disruptive and surprising.

In January’s “Footnotes” publication, we want to focus on the Signals – ignore the noise – and encourage each Family Office member to make intelligent decisions based on facts and data offering information about the likely future to come.  As we move forward through 2024, it will become as important to tune out the noise as it will be to focus on the signals.  Why? Because debt leverages outcomes.  Debt makes good outcomes great.  Debt makes bad outcomes disastrous.  As this publication goes to press, the U.S. has a record $34 trillion in debt at the national level, a record amount of debt in corporate America, AND a record amount of debt on the balance sheet of our U.S. citizens. 

If you will remember, we started these “First Friday” meetings in October 2022, because we saw storm clouds on the horizon. 

The U.S. Federal Reserve was fighting a bought of inflation which turned out to be stickier than originally thought by increasing interest rates and decreasing the liquidity in our economy.  

History tells us there is an 80% probability of the Fed over-tightening, and eventually sending us into a recession. 

While recessions are events intelligent investors would like to avoid, current conditions have heightened our concerns.  Here is why:  Our U.S. debt has increased by over 30 trillion over the last 40 years.  That’s 30X the debt it took our country over 200 years to amass, and most of it accumulated in the last 15 years.