15 Feb 2022
Richard Marwood, Senior Fund Manager at Royal London Asset Management, discusses the prospects for UK equities in 2022, reflects on an eventful 2021 and shares his longer-term views on dividends.
Each year the markets teach us something new and while this equips us for the future to some extent, every year finds something entirely unique to throw at us. It very much feels like ‘known unknowns’ and then ‘unknown unknowns’.
One theme I would take from this year is about just how interconnected the global economy has become and how small glitches in one area can give rise to unexpected impacts. For example, car production in Europe is suffering because of production issues surrounding semiconductors in the Far East while people were sitting in long queues outside UK petrol stations, not because there was a shortage of petrol, but because there was a lack of lorry drivers to get that fuel to the right places.