Tails of the unexpected: How to cope with 2021's Black Swans

Covid impact throws up many surprises

Instead of consensus-tinged forecasting, we continue an annual tradition at Kleinwort Hambros of exploring which unlikely, but feasible, events are not priced by markets in the year ahead.

In the event of these Black Swans, pushed to the overlooked "tails" of probability distributions, how would our strategies perform? How do we protect portfolios against adverse market events? Early to rise Life goes back to normal quickly, leading money velocity, employment, aggregate demand and consumer confidence to rise dramatically, which in turn generates inflation and forces central banks to increase interest rates. Consensus view: Global inflation is expected to remain low given large output gaps (e.g. slack in the labour market, idle aircraft) resulting from the coronavirus...