Time and again, wealthy people ask themselves the question about the long-term stability of our monetary system. After all, the euro, dollar, franc and yen are all so-called FIAT money - artificially created means of payment with no value of their own, supported solely by trust in the issuing state. In his article "The end of fiat money" from DB Research's Concept 2030 study, Jim Reid has reflected on our fiat money system and comes to some disturbing conclusions. Jim Reid, DB Research, considers that a fiat money system is inherently unstable because it is susceptible to high inflation. For it is always too tempting for political decision-makers to create unlimited new money in a monetary system based solely on trust.

In times of monetary policy experiments, there is growing interest in "hard" investments, the supply of which cannot be expanded at will and which therefore serve particularly well as a store of value. Today, the most widely used classic alternative to paper currencies is gold. Manuel Andersch, Senior Currency Analyst of the Bayrische Landesbank, calculates in his study "Megatrend Digitalization - will Bitcoin Gold outpace Gold" that Bitcoin will soon be "harder" than gold. The possible conclusions from this work are breathtaking.

At the beginning of the year, investors are keenly interested in twelve-month forecasts in order to find their investment favourites among the stock markets. "But that doesn't make sense," criticizes Norbert Keimling, head of capital market research at StarCapital, "only those who know how to assess the long-term prospects can identify particularly promising markets. The turn of the year is the wedding of the augurs. The most popular question to them is: How will the DAX perform in the coming year? Norbert Keimling, Head of Capital Market Research at StarCapital, has summarized the forecasts of the leading financial institutions. "The mean value of the DAX estimates for the end of 2020 is 13,999 points, the highest and lowest expectations...

Dear readers, When Oliver Schlick, former Chief Investment Officer of Bayerninvest, and his team led by Professor Rudi Zagst of the Technical University of Munich, translated the turbulence probabilities developed by the capital market seismograph into a stock allocation scheme, the professional pursued an ambitious goal. "The systematic change of the stock weighting analogous to the results of the seismograph should not only be a kind of insurance, i.e. strongly reduce losses in sustained downward movements, but at the same time ensure that upward phases on the stock markets are followed," explains the professional.

Dear readers, The Ifo business climate continued to rise in December. Of particular interest here is the development of business expectations in industry, which we regard as an indicator of sentiment for the global economy and the stock markets. This expectation component has just delivered a buy signal. In October, expectations in the top echelons of industry had improved for the first time after a long period of decline. This was followed by a further slight increase in November and now the third consecutive increase in December. The ifo economic clock still positions the German economy in the downturn quadrant. But the trend is now pointing upwards again. And the ifo traffic light switches to "green" (graphs below).