For the third year in a row, Commonwealth sponsored the Massachusetts Conference for Women. Since 2005, this annual conference has been providing connection, motivation, inspiration, networking opportunities, and skills-building workshops for thousands of women. As we did in 2020 and 2019, my colleague Giovanna Zaffina and I are sharing our experiences and thoughts.

Is it possible we can learn something about a healthy economy from the National Forest Service (NFS)? For decades, the forest service had a policy of extinguishing brush and wildfires at all costs. Its main goals were to prevent fires and to suppress them as quickly as possible if they started. Over time, however, the NFS came to realize that forest fires have a role in nature, one that is necessary for healthy ecosystems to take form. The same may be true for recessions and the long-term health of our economy.

Target-date funds are a class of mutual fund or exchange-traded fund designed to accumulate assets to meet an investor’s needs at a future date—the “target date.” Typically, a target-date fund holds a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. As the fund approaches and passes the designated retirement date, it is periodically rebalanced to be less focused on accumulation and more focused on income preservation. 

Last week saw a number of important economic updates, with a focus on consumer confidence, existing home sales, durable goods orders, and personal income and spending. Consumer confidence improved by more than expected to finish out the year, which is a positive sign for year-end spending reports. There are no major economic data releases scheduled for this week, but we’ll see a number of updates in the first week of the new year.

Rising home prices have been the focus of countless headlines throughout the past year. Accelerated demand in a tight real estate market has produced some captivating statistics. Recently, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported that the third-quarter median sale price for an existing single-family home was 16 percent higher year-over-year. That marks a record since the NAR began capturing the data in 1968. 

China’s push for what is known as “common prosperity” has led to more of a crackdown on companies that don’t fit in with its longer-term goals. Harsh Chinese regulatory oversight is not new, yet recent changes in the country’s philosophy have led to more concerns about the future ramifications for Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges. Below, I’ll dive into the regulatory concerns and how they might affect any U.S.-based holders of U.S.-listed Chinese securities.

In 2021, we have seen our fair share of requests from advisors and their clients to remove or reduce the exposure to China in their portfolios. This has happened for several reasons. In a previous post, I discussed both the strong foreign direct investment into China in 2020 and the stark contrast between the country and the rest of the world in 2020 nine months into the pandemic. Nearly a year later, we have seen the Chinese government take swift actions around foreign direct investment, including the planned delisting of Chinese ride-hailing company, Didi, from U.S. exchanges; fines on technology firms; and questions around the future of U.S. foreign direct investment.

There were a number of important economic data releases last week, with a look at producer inflation, retail sales, home builder confidence, new home construction, industrial production, and the results from the most recent Fed meeting. This will be another busy week of updates, with reports scheduled on consumer confidence, housing sales, durable goods orders, and personal income and spending.

The recent resurgence in COVID-19 cases and the emergence of the highly mutated Omicron variant are reminders that the pandemic is still very much a part of our lives. It is unclear how serious the health implications of the Omicron variant will be, let alone how governments, households, and firms will respond to it. While the financial markets have been through a range of emotions in the past few weeks, there is little evidence on how the underlying global economies will react.

Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen a large-scale exercise in risk assessment. Both governments and individuals have had to make a number of risk assessments, weighing the cost and benefits of different actions without definitive information. Investors are making investment decisions based on risk as well, as no one can be a perfect forecaster. So, to the extent we can, we must not only be conscious of the uncertainty of our investment returns but also of the risk that we will make poor choices when faced with different results, both good and bad.