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The Business Climate for the Year to Come

Image result for mesa

So, how is 2020 going to play out?

In terms of the business/financial health of the developed world, my guess would be that the year willbe a mixed bag, with a plateauing of the major indexes but no sharp downturn.

Central banks, after all, will continue to keep interests law and likely will get innovative with "non-conventional" measure to keep credit flow and equity valuable. 
Governments will continue to go into debt. Everybody is taking a "we owe it to ourselves" attitude. Since we, the human race, hold all the debt that we, the human race, have incurred, the gross amounts involved can't really matter, can they? That is facile and stupid. Accordingly, one will continue to hear it.

The bullish case depends on that.

The bearish case for 2020 looks to geopolitical risk. First, there is a financial crisis underway in Italy. The Italian government is doing everything it can to ensure that this crisis is not only its problem -- that it is the problem of Europe. As an analyst for a London bank wrote recently. "The bottom line is that as and when a serious new crisis blows up, the Italian government is positioning itself to demonstrate to its voters that it has not sought to leave the Eurozone, but rather that the Eurozone is leaving Italy.”

Notice that the analyst did not say “when a serious new crisis blows.” In this matter, one rightly says “as and when” not “if.”
When that crisis does happen, the Italian government is ready to use it as an argument for leaving the Eurozone. That impact of that on the heels of Brexit is obscure and, thus, worrying.
There are a number of other geopolitical risks, any one of which could catalyze a serious downturn. The odds are good that the bullish factors I mentioned above will be enough, though, to counterbalance whatever such bombs DO hit. So we won't go off a cliff. But we probably will be traveling along the top of a mesa all year. 
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