What to expect from America’s stockmarkets in 2025

By Alice Fulwood, Wall Street editor, The Economist

WHAT A DIFFERENCE a year makes. As The World Ahead 2024 went to press in November 2023, the S&P 500, the leading index of American equities, was in the doldrums. Share prices were 15% off their peak in early 2022. A chart of the index’s performance over the previous two years looked like a mountain range: pushed up and down on inflation worries, undercut by rising interest rates and spooked by fears of a growth slowdown. When pondering what 2024 might bring, your correspondent argued that, after a couple of years of deep uncertainty, investors might finally get enough information about the state of the economy to decide whether to be jubilant or miserable.