There is no markets weekly this week but instead I thought we would have a markets outlook 2024 where I talk about where I think we are in the markets and in the economy and where we will be heading next year.
Now to be perfectly clear I don't have a crystal ball. This is simply my best guess as to how themes will unfold in the coming months. Remember a lot of themes can happen between now and the end of next year. This is simply my best guess.
Now before we begin let's see how I did last year. Okay so last year at the end of last year I recall there was tremendous doom and gloom in the commentary. So a lot of people were thinking that we were going to head into a recession and the markets were not happy. So I didn't think that would happen. So at that time when the S&P was trading at 30 or 15 I was thinking would be fine this year and up above 4100 and man did the market far far exceed my expectations. I'm not sure if many people expected the S&P to do as well as it did this year.
Secondly I was thinking that the 10-year yield would end the year above 4.5% and it looks like we're ending the year below 4%. So I got that one wrong. But to be fair though we did see the 10-year yield soar and touch 5% before retreating to where it is today and maybe maybe it will go back up next year. We'll see.
The third thing that I was speculating on was the Euro USD exchange rate going below 1 and I there's no way around that got that really really wrong. At that time I was thinking that the Fed would basically out-hop all the other central banks and looking across the world I was seeing that the US economy was doing much better than everyone else and the US economy was much more interest rate insensitive. For example basically everyone in the US had a 30-year mortgage whereas many people outside of the US have floating rate mortgages. But to my surprise it looks like the Fed is going to out-dove everyone else in the world as we talked about last week. So this is just not going to turn out. And lastly I thought Goldwood end the year above 2000 and that did work out. So all in all 50% I'll take it.
Okay now let's turn to where things are today. So I guess the big question on everyone's mind is are we hitting into a recession? So short answer is I don't think so. I don't see that at the moment.
Now at a high level a recession is basically what an economy produces fewer goods and services this year compared to the last. For example let's put it in car factory terms. You have a car factory that made a hundred cars last year but this year you're producing 99. You know you're producing fewer cars and if you were the entire economy you would be in a recession. Now when you put when an economy produces fewer goods and services it could be due to supply or it could be due to demand. For example you could have less demand for goods and services and thus fall into a recession or you could have supply constraints. Let's talk about each of those factors separately.
First when I think about demand in an economy I just I think about money. So when people have money then they can spend their demand. So where do people get money? Well first they can get it through wages you know they have a job secondly they can get it through wealth asset appreciation or third they can borrow it. Now let's go through each of these sources of money and see where we are today.
Now when you're looking at the job market it looks really good actually looking at a chart of the unemployment rate or unemployment rate is that multi-decade lows and it looks like it's been there for some time. So and the mirror image of this of course is that wages continue to grow at a historically high rate. You have a very low unemployment rate suggesting strong demand for labor and so wages continue to rise. At the moment it looks like wages are rising at around 4% a year.
Now as long as you have strong wage growth which we do and as long as jobs are plentiful like no one's losing their job which at the moment doesn't seem to be happening then people can continue to have income to spend right so that's demand. And as inflation declines that income is going to be able to have more purchasing power. So this income side looks fine.
Secondly, what about spending from assets? Well, if you look at a chart of household net worth in the US, assets minus liabilities, as of the end of the third quarter, it was around all-time highs. Between the end of the third quarter and now, we've seen the equity market go to the moon. So, I'm pretty sure that household net worth is at all-time highs right now. And if you take a step further, you also notice that from a demographic standpoint, a lot of that wealth is held by boomers. Boomers grew up in a world where they could buy a house for like ten dollars, and now that ten dollar house is worth like ten million. Something like that.
And of course, they were buying stock when it was cheap and stocks have appreciated a lot. Now, boomers are retiring, and so they have a lot of wealth to spend. They're not working anymore, but they've accumulated a lot of wealth. Think of the boomer that bought a house in California or think of the boomer that you know, just started putting some money in this 401k, and they have a lot of wealth, but they can continue to spend. Now, to be perfectly clear, the distribution of this wealth is uneven, and we have a lot of people who don't have a lot of wealth, but you know, keep in mind 60% of the people in this country own a home. Home prices have gone up a lot. You have a lot of people who are involved in things like tech stocks and crypto, and that's all gone up a lot. So anyway, looking at an asset perspective, looking at net worth, it looks like people have a lot of wealth they can continue to spend to sustain consumption.
Now, the third thing that I'm looking at is, of course, borrowing money. Now, you can think of this most obvious example would be the housing market, right? So now that the Fed appears to be at least interpreted to be very dovish and interest rates have come down a lot. In the coming weeks, I would expect to see mortgage rates with a 5% handle. Now, that's very likely going to ignite tremendous amounts of demand for housing. And of course, if you're wanting to buy a car, car loan rates will come down a lot. In fact, the most recently that we can see, housing starts are already surging, and if you look at homebuilder stocks, they are also surging as well. So again, as rates come down, more and more people are going to be able to borrow, willing to borrow because it's cheaper to sustain consumption. Now, this also ties in with high net worth. If you have a good net worth, a good balance sheet, and if you have a job, then people are more willing to lend you money. And if interest rates come lower, you're more willing to borrow. So again, looking at the demand side, there's a talent to tell the totality of this. It looks like demand is going to continue to be fine next year. And indeed, if you look at the trajectory of economic growth over the past year, it's been pretty good. Looking at the Atlanta Fed, now GDP now it passed for this quarter, it's taking up towards 3%. Now, we think of the economy's underlying potential growth rate as 2%, so we're growing above trend, above potential at the moment. It's a lot of momentum here, and it looks like it's going to be sustained throughout at least the foreseeable future. So from the demand side, I don't see any problems in sustaining the economy.
Now, what about the supply side? What if we have more supply constraints that make it so that, let's say, going back to the car example, you can't get chips and so you can't produce as many goods and services as you want? So broadly speaking, over the past few years since COVID, we've seen supply chains improve. Now, improvement has been uneven, but it seems like it's getting better. Now, more importantly, though, when I look across the world, it looks like in the Eurozone, they're heading towards a recession. In China, the economy is not doing well. So globally speaking, outside the US, things are slowing down. Now, globally, we all use the same supply chains. So for example, let's think about things like commodities, right? It's a global market. Now, if we have slower demand outside of the US, that frees up supply capacity to serve the US market, and so it doesn't seem to me that supply is going to be constrained as well. So you put this together and you get a picture of the US economy that's doing fine, and to me, I don't see any signs about falling into a recession. So that's one thing.
Now, now that establishing that's how I think about things going forward, where does that leave markets? So overall, I have a very, very positive risk for markets going forward, and I've written about that a couple of weeks ago. So at a high level, what I think is happening is that we are in a quote-unquote crack-up boom.
Now, crack-up boom is typically speaking when you have, I guess you could say, the debasement of the monetary system. It could be through excessive credit growth, for example, like that decreases the value of the currency, and so asset prices inflate. Now, that's one way to look at that, but it doesn't actually have to happen necessarily through excessive growth in big loans. I think it could also happen through excessive deficit spending.
Because in the modern monetary system when you are deficit spending you are basically printing US treasuries and treasuries are very much a money-like asset. So when the US government is let's say conducting a lot of deficit spending I think of it as them buying goods and services and paying for it by printing treasury securities. Now again a US strategy security I can't use it and go pay for dinner at Denny's but if you give it to me it's an asset that I can monetize I have more purchasing power my net worth goes up.
So the creation of US treasury securities the printing of those things is basically a form of helicopter money and we've been doing that to a surprising extent. So we have an economy that did well this past year and deficit is about 7% and if you look at forecasts it looks like it's going to continue to increase going forward. I think that's just where we are as a country as a politics or politics in our culture are. When I look around what I see is that people like to have free stuff and the politicians like to give free stuff so that's how they get elected. So you have person invited and again forgiving student loans and now there's they seem to be wanting to give money to be booked to buy homes and so forth. So that's I think that's a very strong trend going forward.
So the deficit is going to continue to increase so you can think of it as helicopter money continuing to increase and that's really really bullish for financial assets right. You are in a sense you are printing money. Now usually again in a system you have you have shicks and balances. Now for when the government goes and does something like this you usually have two checks to keep it from doing this. One of course is the quote-unquote independent central bank that could raise interest rates and push back against inflationary spending and the second of course is market-based checks where the bond market becomes unhappy and so that arouse is public concern.
Now so far we have these two things occurring and pushing back against the deficit spending over the past year. So we had the Fed of course Hacking rates of five and a half percent and we saw the 10 year treasury yield touch five percent. Now the Fed seems to be doing a 180 and heading towards rate cuts and the bond market seems to be convinced that everything is going to go back the way that it used to be and so we have the 10 year yield heading below 4 percent. So these two forces that I would think of as working against the inflationary impacts of deficit spending are going to sleep and so you can I can see this as removing hurdles for the S&P to continue to soar maybe 2s high as 6,000 next year. Again I have no idea exactly what it will be but I think there is extreme upside risk in this scenario.
Now one of the things that we've noticed over the past 10 years is that when you run loose monetary policy you don't necessarily get let's say inflation and goods and services after all that's dependent upon things like you know what the money is spent on, who has the money and just the supply aspect are you able to produce enough oil and so forth but we did what we did notice over the past 10 years is that it was very inflationary for financial assets. I think the reason this is is that in our society the income and wealth structure is very unequal. So at the end of the day when money gets poured into the economy it goes, it funnels through but ultimately it ends up in the hands of very few people or if you very wealthy people and what do wealthy people do with their money they go and they buy assets. So I suspect that deficit spending is going to have a similar impact where the money they inject into the system is ultimately going to funnel into the hands of a few people who go and buy assets like the S&P 500.
So that's my outlook for the S&P, for the stock market. Now I have been a noted bond bearer for the past two years and I continue to be. So the way that I look at this of course as we all know is just supply and demand if you have the supply of security securities to be basically you know, incidents with no end in sight. There's never any talk of how to get the deficit under control and that's not going to be good for the price of surgeries and that is to say a yield to going to go higher.
We had this pretty dovish term from the Fed that's been I think prompting a countership rally so forth and at the same time I think we have basically two generations of investors who grew up in a bondable market and continue to think that the future will affect the past and that will go back to where we were before. So I firmly believe that the future will not look like the past.
So on the one hand of course we have this tremendous amounts of fiscal spending that will be inflationary but on the other hand on the other side we also have this structural decline in the labor market. This is just demographics right so in the 1980s people decided to have smaller families and so our workforce population today is simply not growing at the same rate that it used to. And so as a result there is a labor shortage. We can see this everywhere right we see this in high wages and we see this in the power of unions.
Now that's that's something that's structural and that's going to continue as boomers retire and they are not fully replaced by the new generation. So again that that's pretty inflationary as well. And you have these geopolitical things that people talk about I think that they are just valid validity there but it's just not it's kind of vague to talk about so I can't put too much weight on that but the demographic aspect though that's very clear and that's already happening.
So again the rapid fiscal spending and this demographic change I think is going to make inflation and thus interest rates secularly trend higher in the coming years. Now eventually I think this is going to be more widely understood. So I still expect a 10 year yield next year to continue the trend higher. I mean as people watch this in Peace or as people watch inflation perhaps stabilize between let's say three and four percent I can see the 10 year again rising above five percent.
Again I've been saying this for some time but for me it's really hard to imagine a world where interest rates don't trend higher. Actually if you ask anyone let's say a hundred years ago from the US or anyone today who is let's say from Brazil or some kind of middle-income country and just point to these you know fiscal policy point to monetary policy and so forth and they could all tell you immediately that you know interest rates are going to go higher and because that's inflationary. I don't think that US investors have that sense yet but I think they will get there.
Okay so this year I don't have any view on the dollar. Again the dollar is going to be depend upon the decisions of the Fed and the other central banks and I'm getting the sense as we as we go forward as you go into an election cycle throughout the world there's going to be some more politics involved and I don't have enough insight or I don't have any view on that and okay the last thing I'll talk about is gold.
So gold of course has been well sustained and also it's been I guess being accumulated by central banks. Now gold people often talk about as a reflection of things like inflation or real interest rates and so forth so everyone views gold differently. So I think of gold as basically a combination of all those things but at the end of the day it's kind of a hedge against the monetary system. Now I've talked about how the US doesn't seem to be well managed but it's the kind of the same thing everywhere in the world and as this mismanagement continues I think there's going to be more and more interest in gold and on top of that of course we could also have the potential for geopolitical flare-ups.
So rather than talk about things like currency relative currency strength it seems like people are probably going to just buy some more gold as a hedge of what we're seeing in the sovereign space. So I think gold continues to trend higher I think we can go up let's say so we're 2000 today and go up another 20% 2400 for next year.
Alright so those are my three views for the next year. Massive bull market inequities, bond market sells off and of course gold bull market continues. Let's see how I did next year.
Alright guys if I don't see you before then happy new year and thanks so much for watching this channel and supporting my work I really appreciate it. Talk to you guys soon.