2021: Cyclical Year In Review
A look at the year from a macro and Hurstonian viewpoint with highlights and lowlights. Also, a look at what is to come in 2022 from Sigma-L.
A Year to Remember
Of course 2021 will be remembered in most of the public’s mind as the year the pandemic really took hold and we assimilated a new lexicon: variant of concern, lockdowns, vaccinations, case counts, work from home, delta, alpha, omicron and so on.
One term that was lurking in the background all year, perhaps more so in the second half of the year, was inflation. The bogeyman of central banks, the measure they are tasked with, in most developed economies, to keep below a certain threshold. A task most have miserably failed to achieve at this point in time. They are largely powerless of course, a feeble set of monetary levers that are increasingly fragile against a background of highly leveraged assets they dare not threaten.
In addition, they have little control over the true nature of financial markets, that of X-motivation, the term coined by JM Hurst to describe the components in financial markets driven by periodic motion. A look at the cyclical structure in oil tell…