COVID is over, if you want it, or so J.P. Morgan says.
In its annual global economic outlook, the U.S. investment bank optimistically predicted that 2022 will mark a huge improvement from the past two years.
The report said the new year would bring the end of the pandemic and a return to normal economic and market conditions. The S&P will gain 8%, the bank wrote, while emerging markets will add a whopping 18%.
“Our view is that 2022 will be the year of a full global recovery,” Marko Kolanovic, J.P. Morgan’s chief global markets strategist, wrote in a note to clients this week. “This is warranted by achieving broad population immunity [to COVID-19] and with the help of human ingenuity, such as new therapeutics expected to be broadly available in 2022.”
The new vaccines and drugs that the bank expects to be released will lead to a “strong cyclical recovery, a return of global mobility, and a release of pent-up demand from consumers.” the outlook said.
While COVID will likely always exist at some level and become endemic, the authors said, its risks will be significantly reduced, and the virus “will continue to have a diminishing impact on economies and markets, even if certain sectors remain vulnerable to an increase in COVID-19 cases.” Markets will also be unbothered. “Investors now take the uncertainty in stride,” the report said.
And while economists predict record inflation and global supply-chain kinks well into next year, J.P. Morgan isn’t sweating it.
“Over the medium term, we expect the global economy will work to solve the problems that emerged in 2021,” the report said. “As the pandemic fades, consumers should redirect spending from goods and toward services,” it continued. Meanwhile, the bank added that supply-chain bottlenecks will alleviate and that globalization will keep the price of goods in check, as it has for the past two decades.
Other banks have shared in J.P. Morgan’s positive outlook. Credit Suisse analysts raised their S&P 500 price target to 5,200 from 5,000 in their December report (the S&P 500 was at 4,677 as of Thursday afternoon) and predicted “robust” economic growth for the U.S. Goldman Sachs also expects U.S. markets to grow, with the S&P hitting 5,100 by the end of 2022.
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