A year of extraordinary returns on the Australian stock market has been counter-balanced by difficult real-life conditions with lockdowns, anxiety over rising COVID case numbers, protests and border closures.
Around the world millions of people were forced to stay home, sometimes for months on end, due to the pandemic. Vaccines allowed a return to seminormality in early 2021 that caused a flurry of economic activity.“That has put a monkey wrench into the economies because it has delayed that opening and made things far more uncertain.”
Ms Liu said there had been months worth of semiconductor parts sitting in the supply pipeline, but most companies never stockpiled anything. They didn’t need to. Then, there was a sudden crunch in 2020 as Donald Trump’s 2019 sanctions on Huawei clashed with COVID-19. Consumers around the world were suddenly snapping up electronic equipment to work and study from home.
In the last two years he has noticed ultra-high net wealth clients wanted to invest in renewables to help decarbonise the economy and were putting pressure on companies to eradicate modern slavery in their global supply chains. And if anyone doubted how much money was still sitting on the sidelines right up to the end of the year, CSL’s $16.4 billion bid for Swiss pharma company Vifor in mid-December made it crystal clear.