Kiplinger: 2025 Stocks Forecast: What Stock Pros Expect This Year

By SIMON CONSTABLE 

Landing on a 2025 stocks forecast is a tricky business. Both 2023 and 2024 were some of the best times for investors. Each of those years produced total returns in double digits. But will 2025 also be a booming year for equities? History says it’s unlikely, while analysts hold differing positions.

Since 1942, three-year annual gains of 10% have occurred just three times. Only twice have there been four consecutive years of double-digit gains and only once has there been a five-year run.

“There is certainly a possibility that we have another gain that’s double-digit,” says Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA. “The problem is how do we know if we will have a gain or a loss.” Read more here.

HitomiAkane, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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#NATO: Defense sector due for a boom. @BatchelorShow @RealConstable, Occitanie

 By SIMON CONSTABLE

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1915 French Artillery tractor See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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#FRANCE: New England temperature, no snow. @RealConstable @BatchelorShow Occitanie

By SIMON CONSTABLE

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Paris Cafe 1924. Agence Rol , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Briefings Magazine: Suddenly, Global Defense Spending Booms

By SIMON CONSTABLE

It was 1962, and tensions were rising as the Soviet Union began a buildup of nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles south of the United States. Worries of a nuclear Armageddon were palpable. Fortunately, the crisis was averted—and so was the military buildup. Over the next six decades, in a remarkable string of declines, global defense spending (including military equipment, war matériel, personnel, and weaponry) would fall from 6.3 percent of global GDP in 1962 to a low of 2.1 percent in 2018, helped in part by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But that was then. In a turnabout whose magnitude may surprise you, global defense spending rose a whopping 6.8 percent in 2023 from the previous year to a staggering $2.4 trillion, the largest annual increase since 2009. Read more here.

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#FLASHBACK: The AOL and Time Warner fiasco. @RealConstable @BatchelorShow, Occitanie

 By SIMON CONSTABLE

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Sketch of building called “Le France”, headquarters of company AOL Times Warner (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), in 1999. Holomap, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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#FRANCE: The bourgeois commodities, OJ, coffee, chocolate soar. @RealConstable @BatchelorShow Occitanie

 By SIMON CONSTABLE

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Atelier du Chocolat Bayonne, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Korn Ferry: A Slump in Britain’s Hiring

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Two years ago, British companies couldn’t find enough people to work for them. It was the Great Resignation of 2022, and salaries soared. 

But things have changed dramatically since then. New job vacancies in the UK have dropped by a staggering 23% through the end of November versus the same time last year, according to data from job-posting website Indeed. Britain is also far behind other rich countries such as Germany, Ireland, the US, and Canada, in which job openings dropped between 5% and 15% over the same period. Read more here.

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