Clear Harbor Outlook for 2023 Q4
As we close out the third quarter, we find markets still struggling to digest the economic and financial cross-currents triggered by global inflation and the efforts of central banks to combat it. Growth continues to trend downward almost everywhere, prompting European equities to soften and China-dominated emerging markets indexes to decline more steeply. In the U.S., too, stocks gave back some of the year’s gains as the Federal Reserve’s record-setting rate-hike campaign helped to cut both inflation and growth roughly in half. Yet U.S. markets are faring better than most others on a year-to-date basis, supported by remarkable resilience in consumption and employment. In cap-weighted indexes, a handful of high-fliers have even kept returns solidly positive—the S&P 500 remains up 13.3% so far this year—despite more modest gains in average earnings.