Prepare your portfolio for a return of the Roaring ’20s

Don’t believe the pessimists. What with the end of lockdown and central bankers taking charge of government spending, party time is just around the corner, says John Stepek.

"Roaring 20s" cover illustration

Get ready for a boom. Starting next week, the UK is rolling out a vaccine for Covid-19. That has to be good news for the economy – it marks the beginning of the end of lockdowns. And in fact, it might be much better news than anyone expects. Some have suffered far more than others as a result of lockdown, but it is clear that, on aggregate, it has been good for household balance sheets on both sides of the Atlantic. As Richard de Chazal of wealth manager William Blair notes, in the US last quarter “debt as a percentage of disposable personal income fell to its lowest level in a quarter of a century”. In other words, there’s a lot of money out there waiting to be spent.

Some naysayers point to surveys suggesting that consumers plan to maintain the savings habit once lockdown is over. But after a year of no holidays, no eating out and no high street shopping sprees, how inclined to fiscal prudence will we really feel? We suspect this is one of the few occasions where the phrase “pent-up demand” has genuine meaning. So the stage is set for a short-term boom as all that delayed demand floods out in the early part of next year. But what happens then? Why will this be anything more than a short-term sugar rush?

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.