Fisher Investments - This Week In Review (Jan. 10, 2025)

Transcript

Stephanie Kuehne:

Hello and welcome to This Week in Review. This weekly segment is designed to highlight a few things that you might have missed this week, what they mean for financial markets, and most importantly, investors.

Now, let's look at what happened this week.

First, Canadian politics.

On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he's stepping down as the leader of the Liberal Party. This decision didn't come as a shock. There's been weeks of mounting pressure on Trudeau, with several of his cabinet members resigning recently. Trudeau has been Canada's prime minister since 2015, and while he'll stay on temporarily as a caretaker, the search for a new leader is underway.

So, what's next? Canadian federal elections are set for later this year, but before that, we could see a no-confidence vote in parliament as early as March. Trudeau's decision puts Canada in a category with other major countries like Germany and France, where political uncertainty has been making headlines. While uncertainty can feel unsettling, markets usually find their footing once the dust settles and clarity emerges.

Next, a US offshore drilling ban.

Earlier this week, President Joe Biden announced an executive action banning new oil and gas leasing across over 600 million acres of US waters. But here's the key. This ban doesn't affect existing drilling operations. It just stops the new leases for future projects, which could take years to get up and running anyway. For context, the most recent oil growth in the US has come from onshore shale fields on private- or state-owned land. Offshore production, while it's significant, isn't where the major growth is happening right now. This move strikes us as more of a political statement by the outgoing Biden administration, rather than something that will shake up oil markets in a big way.

For more on this topic, check out our article on the Insight section of FisherInvestments.com. You can also find the article linked in the description of this video.

Last, consumer sentiment in the eurozone and the US.

This week, we got sentiment surveys that shed light on how consumers are feeling about the state of the economy in the eurozone and in the US. In the eurozone, sentiment is relatively dour; concerns over slow rate cuts, trade tariffs and underwhelming stock market returns are weighing on consumers. Meanwhile, in the US, folks are feeling a little more optimistic after robust stock market returns of 2024.

Consumer confidence surveys are not crystal balls for the market. At best, they reflect what's happening in real time and at worst, they lag behind. They may not necessarily give meaningful clues about what stocks will do next, so while they're interesting to monitor, we wouldn't recommend using these surveys to make big investing decisions. And that's all for this episode.

To learn more about what we're watching, check out our other series, 3 Things You Need to Know This Week, released each Monday. You can also visit the Insight section of FisherInvestments.com. Thanks for joining us and don't forget to subscribe!