Ryan Stancil,
Editor
Jan. 16, 2023
It’s all starting to come to a head.
That seems to be the general sentiment when it comes to the market.
Housing is still in crisis. Inflation is still eating away at savings and retirement accounts. And I probably don’t need to tell you about the price of eggs.
Long story short, it doesn’t seem like things are getting any better economically.
And while recent news has said that inflation cooled slightly in December, that does nothing to take away from the next big issue that the market is already starting to face.
If you haven’t seen the headlines yet, you will soon.
Layoffs are coming. They’re already affecting a number of sectors with thousands losing their jobs in industries like tech and finance.
Amazon recently announced it’s reducing its workforce by 18,000. Salesforce has shed jobs. So have Coinbase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, just to name a few. A general market slowdown is at the heart of it, and this wave is just the latest in a trend of layoffs that has been happening since last year.
But given that the economy is continuing to deteriorate as calls for a recession grow louder, this is only going to become more widespread.
Car repossessions have been on the rise for the past few weeks. For many Americans, credit card debt is going up as rainy-day funds shrink. To top that off, the Fed said rates will likely have to keep going up, though not as fast and by as much as they have been.
So Americans will have to deal with the pain of higher prices in all aspects of life for a little while longer. That’s assuming they have a job to pay those prices to begin with, of course.
This is all a natural conclusion to the age of cheap money ending and the resulting fallout. Now we’re left to anticipate what the worst of that is going to look like and pick up the pieces once it’s over.
There’s no telling just how hard things are going to get over the next few quarters. Already, in these first few weeks of 2023, things are looking better than expected, even with experts calling for slow growth to come.
Some talking heads, of course, are saying the outlook is catastrophic. That grabs attention, for sure, but it doesn’t really do much to help paint the reality of the situation.
The truth is that no one can be completely sure how things are going to unfold over the next few months. This is a unique situation that we’ve never seen before and there are still a lot of catalysts to come.
With that being the case, it pays to take proactive steps in protecting what’s yours. With everything that’s changed over the past two years or so, it’s gotten harder to make money in the markets. But it isn’t impossible.
With the right investment strategy, you can position your portfolio to thrive no matter what the broader market is doing.
Ryan Stancil
Editor, Daily Profit Cycle