LIZ ANN SONDERS: I'm Liz Ann Sonders.

KATHY JONES: And I'm Kathy Jones.

LIZ ANN: And this is On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, we analyze what's happening in the markets and discuss how it might affect your investments.

KATHY: Well, hi, Liz Ann. Once again, it's time for us to put on our prediction hats and look ahead to next year and talk about what we think will happen.

LIZ ANN: I don't wear my prediction hat very well these days. And I don't know that I own enough Windex to clear the crystal ball that doesn't tend to serve any of us very well anyway. But this is going to be a tricky one. But the format of today's show is a little bit different from the typical episode. Like we did last year, we are going to focus just on our outlooks for 2025. And we should say this is part 1; we're going to focus on the equities market and international investments. And then what do you have coming up, Kathy?

KATHY: That's right. Next week I'll be joined by my colleagues, Collin Martin and Cooper Howard, and we'll dig into all things fixed income for 2025.

LIZ ANN: Fabulous and we know these outlooks are always among the most popular episodes of the year. So I want to start out by saying you can find the full in-depth written versions of all of our market outlook reports complete with charts and graphs and even cartoons at schwab.com/learn. We have got just a ton of ground to cover today. So we're going to start with equities and the overall U.S. economy, and I've enlisted my colleague Kevin Gordon to join me in that discussion. After that, I'm going to turn it back to you, Kathy, for your discussion with Jeffrey Kleintop on the international markets.

KATHY: Thanks, Liz Ann. And I also want to mention that we just had our colleague Mike Townsend give his full post-election analysis a couple of weeks ago. But if you want more of his reports from Washington, make sure you follow his WashingtonWise podcast, WashingtonWise all in one word.

LIZ ANN: You will definitely want to follow Mike's reports as we transition to a new administration in 2025. He has such incredible insights. But for now, I am happy to welcome back to the show Kevin Gordon. He is my research associate, my right hand, my left hand. And I really think of him as just an integral part of the research that we put out. He's my chart guru, works with me in providing analysis on the economy and the market for Schwab's clients. He helps develop deep-dive projects as well as content for Schwab's public website, internal business partners, social media outlets. He is a frequent guest on CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg TV and radio, CBS News, and is regularly quoted in The New York Times, Forbes, Market Watch, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. 

So Kevin, as always, thanks for being here today.

KEVIN: Yeah, thanks for having me. I cannot believe it's been another year. You know, every time we get together to do this, it's just so striking to me that we're already on another year, but …

LIZ ANN: Yeah, time does fly. And when this episode gets released, I think it'll be five days following the publishing and posting of the written version of this. So what I thought we would do as we go through this is maybe provide a little preview to some degree in the order we tackled what are a pretty wide variety of topics. So, if you don't mind, Kevin, I'll start and then weave you in, and we'll see where this goes over the next 20 minutes or so. Does that work for you?

KEVIN: That sounds great to me. Let's do it.

LIZ ANN: So we always have fun, even when topics aren't all that fun, with a component of these outlooks. We have an incredible colleague Charlos Gary, who is our resident in-house cartoonist. And we all like to allow his creative juices to flow and often will provide rudimentary stick figures, which is about where my artistic talents stop. And then he comes up with these great cartoons. So without previewing exactly what you're going to see, I did want to tease it because it's a fun one. 

But the overarching theme at least that we start with from a macro perspective is just a unique amount of uncertainty. Not that there's ever an environment that is certain. But this one's particularly unique given, not just the policy proposals put forth by the incoming Trump administration, but how many crosscurrents are associated with those policy proposals. Notably, the fact that you've got ostensibly pro-growth policies on the tax side of things and the regulatory side of things, but then you've got the more significant uncertainty and possibility of weaker growth and higher inflation that would accompany the combination of policies being proposed on tariffs and immigration. So we do touch on a lot of that. 

But one of the things we wanted to start with in the outlook is just a simple framing of the makeup of Washington and just put it in the context of what's happened in history. Of course, we did have a Republican sweep, and we have a table in there that looks at how the stock market has performed, inflation, economic growth, and even debt-to-GDP and in some, in the past, under all Republican control, you've had pretty decent stock market performance, actually slight decline in inflation on average, decent but not gangbusters economic performance, and flattish to slightly deteriorating debt-to-GDP. I think on the sort of market front and the economy front, we might not be ultimately too far off that based on history, but I think that there is upside risk to both inflation and debt-to-GDP, which we talk about in detail. 

So, there's, I know you've seen it, and we have shared it back and forth in a number of ways, Kevin, a few reports that have been written recently from the folks out of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, one in particular that we're going to link to in the written report, and it was a really fascinating attempt at looking at the combination of policies being proposed with regard to deportation, tariffs, both on imported goods from around the world, but then the specifically higher ones on imported goods from China. So I won't go into those details, but the net based on our own work, as well as what we saw from Peterson, is that the combination of those is most likely to put some downward pressure on growth and upward pressure on inflation. And then they also did an interesting look at, not just the tariff component, but any potential changes due to the extension of the 2017 tax cuts. 

And an interesting look by income quartile at where you see benefits and where you see hits, and the net being that, unfortunately, only the top 1% from an income distribution perspective are likely to benefit from those combined policies. That said, we don't ultimately know what's going to happen. We took a look at what happened in 2018, using that as a bit of a playbook for what we might expect, at least as it relates to tariffs and the fact that tariffed goods at that time in 2018 saw inflation really accelerate in those areas, even though overall inflation was fairly benign, and the non-tariffed goods continued to be fairly benign as well. 

So that is something to consider as we head into 2025. You know, I kind of concluded this section just looking at an interesting index that we can track on places like Bloomberg, which is a policy uncertainty index, and there are broad ones that are easy to track, but this one is specifically tied to trade policy uncertainty, and took it back to 2016 to show what happened in that post-2018 trade war scenario, where you not only saw a spike in trade policy uncertainty, but it led ultimately to a pickup in volatility, so some expectation there.

Finally, before I turn it over to you, even before the election, we had had an expectation that we were going to see an easing on some of these bifurcations that have characterized the backdrop, that we would probably start to see some conversion in goods inflation versus services inflation with hopefully finally the services-oriented inflation coming down, and fortunately the possibility of some goods inflation picking back up, especially tied to tariffs, and maybe also some convergence in manufacturing versus services. Obviously, services has been a stronger piece of the economy, but we may be starting to see a little bit of a cooling off in services and a bit of pickup in manufacturing. And the recent cyclicals outperformance is also supportive of a pickup in manufacturing. So that would be some positive news. But I want to turn it over to you now and talk a little bit, Kevin, about just conditions in the labor market with a tie-in to what we might expect from an immigration policy perspective.

KEVIN: Yeah, and the one thing that came to my mind as you were going through that, and I'm actually going to, before I dive into my section that I covered more in depth, one question I'll throw back to you quickly because not only is it a springboard for where we are in terms of moving on to immigration policy, but I find that it's so critical and so crucial. And the one thing I wanted to maybe have you elaborate on for listeners is specifically related to tariffs because I know we've become sticklers about terminology and how it's phrased, but I think it's, in my opinion, actually maybe one of the most important parts of this report. Of course, there's a lot that's important, but I find it in the conversations that I have with clients, with friends, with family, I find one of those maybe widely misunderstood things in terms of its definition. So just quickly before, I would love you to just opine on that quickly before I go in.

LIZ ANN: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. And that's why I had fun a little bit with the title of the section by putting the word "on" in quotes, you know, on tariffs. And we just wanted to kind of go back to the basics, because there's been so much shorthanding, especially in the media, around tariffs, with the shorthand being headlines like "tariffs on China" or "tariffs on Mexico." 

I even saw in a very reputable newspaper, you know, "Mexico and Canada will be charged tariffs." And I thought that that's kind of a dangerous shorthand because there are surprisingly a lot of people that don't realize that the actual tariff is paid by the U.S. company importing whatever the tariffed good or product is from the country. It's not paid by the other country. You know, there's lots of goals to tariffs and ultimately, you know, evening out trade policy, but the actual payment of the tariff is by the U.S. company importing the products. And to your point, Kevin, you and I have been so surprised at how many people actually think the tariff is paid by the country that is being targeted.

KEVIN: Yeah, and I think it's important too because so much of what you were talking about earlier in terms of the 2018 playbook, I think that comes up a lot in conversation and analysis when we're thinking about the second Trump administration. And as humans, I think we're conditioned to go back to that time and say, "OK, well, here's exactly how it could play out." And for a number of reasons, we don't think that that's the case, even if you just look at the economic backdrop today, this is where the labor market comes into play and where immigration policy in particular comes into play. 

If you kind of think about what is being proposed, and a lot of what you covered, which was in the Peterson Institute table, just in terms of restrictions on immigration flows, but also potential deportations, again, we don't know the scale of this, and it's not technically a policy yet because we haven't had the formal transition of power yet. So all of this is really just kind of taking a really broad approach and looking at it from a zoomed-out perspective and really looking at what the range of outcomes is, but if you just look at the relationship in the first visual that I covered in the report, if you just look at the relationship between real GDP growth and employment of the labor force, I mean, it's pretty tight over time and we've got the chart going back to the 1950s. You could see that when labor force growth starts to deteriorate, GDP growth starts to deteriorate, and vice versa. So if there is some sort of material hit to labor supply via mass deportations or just some significant restriction on migration flow, then that's probably a net negative for GDP. The tough thing in my head, which came to me so much as I was writing this and thinking about this was, this is a 2025 outlook. So we're kind of conditioned to think in terms of January 1st to December 31st, what's going to happen, right?

LIZ ANN: Right, as if the world stops on December 31st and then kicks back in with a whole new perspective. 

KEVIN: Exactly.

LIZ ANN: But you're right, when we're in outlook-writing mode, we get in that calendar year. But I think it's, I'm so glad you pointed that out because I think sometimes you want to remind people that things are more fluid …

KEVIN: Yeah.

LIZ ANN: … even if we think in calendar year terms.

KEVIN: And I think labor policy is one that, you know, this is a multi-year thing. And you think about potential GDP growth over time. It's the sum of labor force and productivity growth. So it's not something that just happens, you know, on a 12-month basis only in one given year where you could just figure out exactly what's going to be the impact from, you know, proposed policy. So I think that's the first thing that, you know, listeners should take away from this. Second thing being that, you know, the labor market is just in a different spot today than it was when Trump was coming in the first time.

And you think about, you know, 2017, there were so many tailwinds, not just for the U.S., but for the world. You know, you had all 45 OECD countries in growth mode. Going into that year, you had a pretty significant turn in corporate earnings, at least for the U.S., which was, you know, pretty much aiding the broader business sector. And I think that's why 2017 was a relatively good year for risk assets. It was a relatively good year for the global economy. You know, not as much this year where we have been in this uptrend in terms of the unemployment rate, at least in the case of the United States where, yes, we've seen some relief over the past few months, but you've definitely seen an uptrend over the past couple of years. There has been a reversal. It hasn't been driven as much by layoffs. It's been driven more by an expansion in the labor force, which is a good thing. But there is less room to work with, I think, when it comes to more aggressive tariff policy or more aggressive immigration policy. 

And from an immigration standpoint in particular, what makes this difficult, too, is when you look over the past four to five years, almost all of the growth in the labor force in the U.S. has been from the foreign-born individuals. It has not been from the domestic or native-born labor force. And, you know, it's for several reasons. The pandemic has a role in that in terms of, you know, the number of individuals, particularly over the age of 55, who are sort of in their own category, who have kind of dropped out of the labor force, who haven't returned. Prime-age labor force participation still looks pretty good in the U.S., but we just don't have that much native-born labor anymore to just sustain that kind of growth, so if you take that portion of the population out, then you kind of restrict your own growth. But again, that's a multi-year process. I don't think that's something that just unfolds magically in '25 and we get some sort of answer by the end of the year. But that is really kind of a centerpiece to how we were thinking about what could restrict growth moving forward. So I could see a scenario where you don't really have as much restrictive policy affecting growth, maybe even in the first half of the year, maybe even for the majority of the year. 

But to your point that you made about things like manufacturing and where we were looking for some convergences, whether it's manufacturing-versus-services or anything related to the consumer, I do think that maybe something that could be a little bit more tangible, or that could be a little bit more apparent earlier in the year, is things related to business capital spending and housing. And these are areas where we've really been looking for more meaningful recoveries to take hold. And I think a lot of this centers on what goes on with the Fed and monetary policy in particular, where if you do get any policies that are a little bit more inflationary or at least contribute to more inflation volatility, which we don't know the answer to that yet. But if that happens to be the case, there could be a scenario where the Fed just cuts less and has to keep rates a little bit more elevated and has to take a little bit more of a cautious approach. And if that's the case, we have a chart in the outlook that's a simple look at the housing affordability index from the National Association of Realtors. And you can see in the chart, and it's probably no surprise to anybody who has paid attention to housing this year that plunged to basically multi-decade lows because of higher mortgage rates, because of high home prices, and just this really, really high wall that people had to sort of climb over to be able to afford a home. 

And I think that with any potential restriction on the construction sector in particular, especially as it relates to immigration, because that's a very sort of dominated sector when it comes to the percentage of foreign-born individuals who make up that sector, if you get restrictions on housing and you still are find yourself in a low supply environment where prices still go up and have some upside, I could see a scenario where housing affordability really struggles. So there are some channels where you can see the effects of this, even policy aside, where it has taken a long time for these areas to recover. And it's a little bit more centered on monetary policy still being somewhat restrictive. 

But if the Fed is sort of forced to be in that position because inflation is still relatively volatile, then I could see a scenario where, you know, it takes longer for these convergences to happen. And if you tie that into what goes on in the stock market, you know, it's kind of hard because on the one hand you do have, as you mentioned at the beginning of this episode, you do have some pro-growth policies for sure. But you also have some of these combating policies that may be a little bit more inflationary or even stagflationary. So I think our overarching theme, and I would love your thoughts on this too, but broadly from an equity market perspective, the expectation that you would get a repeat of what you had this year, meaning a lot less volatility at the index level but a lot more churn under the surface, our expectation is almost that you kind of see a flip of that where you do start to see more volatility at the index level, maybe driven more by the bond market because there's more of an inflationary concern, not to the extent that we go back to what we experienced in '21 and 2022, but just that there's more volatility associated with the uncertainty of the trajectory of inflation. But that's kind of how we think about a lot of these uncertainties and crosscurrents driving the market. It's not going to be maybe as hidden as much below the surface, but it starts to filter up above the surface. I would love to get your thoughts, especially after such an amazing year in terms of how many record highs we've seen for the S&P 500, which, you know, it may seem counterintuitive, but doesn't always bode necessarily well for the following year.

LIZ ANN: Right. And I think that's important. If you look at a sort of a collection of studies, which we summarize quickly in this report around, you know, breadth conditions, you put an interesting chart in on, you know, where the market is relative to moving averages. If you look at spreads between new highs and new lows, if you look at the recent drop in the volatility index, it tends to be supportive based on history of decent returns with a one-year time horizon. 

But almost all of them also suggest in the shorter term, you could see some volatility spikes, especially to bring the macro back into it, given not just all the uncertainties with regard to the competing policies that are out there, but what we also learned in the past Trump administration is some of the announcements will often happen literally via post on social media, whether it's Truth Social or X, formerly Twitter. So that's another force at play that's important. But, you know, it's for the most part a constructive outlook, I would say some of the risks include somewhat stretched valuations and a bit of frothy sentiment. You know where I'm going with this next one, Kevin, we always say, we always remind people, not that there's any such thing as the perfect market-timing tool in anybody's toolbox—it doesn't exist—but neither valuation nor stretched sentiment could be considered a market-timing tool. 

They do arguably establish heightened risk to the extent that there's a negative catalyst if you've got a very expensive market or you have really stretched sentiment. We kind of concluded the look at the year ahead with some sentiment conditions. And I actually just discussed this at an event at which I got the question "Boy, this seems as frothy as what we saw back in the late 1990s?" I think it is a little bit different. There are some signs of significant speculative excess. You don't have to go further than a banana duct-taped to a piece of canvas going for $6 million to suggest that there's a bit of speculative froth, and you're seeing it in things like leveraged single-stock exchange-traded funds. Pretty easy to argue there's some speculation and maybe a bit of froth in the crypto space. 

So there are pockets, but as we think back in history as a guide to what might happen, when we had a similar experience in late 2017 when there was a lot of speculative froth associated with volatility being perceived to stay low and inverse leveraged exchange-traded fund products tied to a bet that volatility would stay low. Well, it didn't. And you had what is now referred to as Volmageddon. So I do think we could see some unwinding of some of the speculation with some pops in volatility in those areas most affected by it without it necessarily bringing the entire market down with it. So we kind of conclude with a look at some of the risks. 

The last thing I'd say, and I'll ask you if you have any final thoughts, but our job is not only to just assess the landscape, but talk about upside potential and downside risks, often referred to as the tails of a distribution of outcomes. And one of the conclusions that I think we've come to is that in this unique environment, the tails might be, as they say, a little bit fatter than say in a normal, whatever that's defined as, environment. So that was one of kind of my concluding thoughts and wanted to hear maybe what your final thoughts are as we kind of close the books on this outlook in this episode.

KEVIN: Yeah, I think it's a great way to characterize it, and I often think about, you know, just, I'm trying to think of life analogies, whether it's going to a doctor's office or taking a flight or anything, where the expectation that somebody gives you is the expectation that this is going to be tough or that it's going to be all right. And from our standpoint, this is about managing volatility expectations. So it'd be very different if we were feeling very comfortable about this being a really smooth ride and relatively little risk associated with everything, whether it's from Washington or whether it's slower growth in certain parts of the world. So I think this becomes just a scenario of "We have to manage more volatility risk potentially." 

And in a different way, as opposed to what had been the case in 2024, to the earlier point we made about a lot more volatility below the surface, but not necessarily filtering up to the indexes. And I think the final thing I'll say is, as we're entering the year, in my mind, I'm always picturing this T-chart where on the left, there's the header that says, "What we know," and on the right, there's the header that says, "What we don't know." And of course, the "What we don't know" is much longer in my mind than what's on the left. 

But you're heading into the year, and we have, you know, the stats on this in the report, and we've got it in charts. But what we do know is that breadth is relatively healthy, and that's now up and down the cap spectrum, hadn't been that way in the first half of this year. You've got relatively solid participation in terms of the number of stocks that are advancing. It's not just the Magnificent Seven that are driving returns. They're not even all the best performers, you know, in the S&P 500 this year. So there's a lot going well for the market. There's a lot going well for the economy. But there's a different set of risks now heading into this next year. So it's much better place to be from a stock market perspective, but we also want to recognize that, to your point, you do need to pay attention to just the tail risk being a little bit fatter this time. Not to say that it's Armageddon on our doorstep because we're never that way, but it's just managing expectations around volatility.

LIZ ANN: Yeah, great points, Kevin. It makes me think of one of my long-held views and one of my mantras around, you know, it's not what we know, meaning about the future, that matters because no one knows. And it's maybe even trickier this time because of everything we already talked about. It's what we do along the way that matters. And hopefully this outlook will put some of that in perspective. But the real overarching piece of this is we do this for all of you, and we're here to help, and we hope you enjoy the outlook. But Kevin, thanks for tag-teaming with me with this, both on this episode and in putting this outlook together and looking forward to closing the books on the year.

KEVIN: Yeah, it's always fun. Thanks for having me.

KATHY: Joining me now is Jeffrey Kleintop. Jeff is Schwab's chief global strategist and one of our managing directors. Cited in The Wall Street Journal as one of Wall Street's best and brightest, Jeff frequently appears on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and CNN. And he's also frequently quoted in TheWall Street Journal, Barron's, and the Financial Times. So welcome to the podcast, Jeff.

JEFF KLEINTOP: Thanks for having me. I'm real excited.

KATHY: I want to remind our listeners before we get started that your full outlook with all the relevant charts and graphs is available to read on the Schwab website, and we'll link to that in the show notes. 

But why don't you start us off today with an overview of your outlook for the global economy and stock markets in 2025?

JEFF: Absolutely. So the world's biggest two economies may slow in 2025. We see better growth, though, among developed economies outside the U.S. after many of them experienced rolling recessions over the past six quarters. In fact, none of the top 45 economies are expected to be in recession in 2025, and three quarters of them are expected to grow faster next year, including Europe, Japan, Canada, and the U.K.

Better economic growth can lift earnings growth with pretty easy comparisons to a year ago when earnings were falling. In fact, in the just-reported Q3 earnings season, the earnings of European companies actually outpaced those of the U.S. for the first time in about five or six quarters. And valuations, they can expand from below-average levels on the outlook for that improving growth and rate cuts as well. And that can mean better returns for international stocks in 2025 than we saw here in 2024.

KATHY: So Jeff, we've heard a lot about tariffs lately. We've had many conversations about them. What about that risk? How do tariffs impact your outlook?

JEFF: Yeah, tariffs do pose a risk to growth. In fact, if you add up every tariff threat from the Trump campaign, and we have, the U.S. weighted average tariff on imports from the rest of the world could rise from about 2.6% to 26%. And fans of Ferris Bueller's Day Off know, this would rival the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that preceded and worsened the Great Depression.

But, Kathy, I think the bark might be worse than the bite. Trump appears to be using the tariffs as a tool of statecraft, as seen with the recent tariff announcements on Mexico in an effort to curb illegal immigration, rather than economic policy. So if instead, U.S. import tariffs just quadruple—just—to 10%, and are matched with tariffs by all other nations on U.S. exports, the IMF has estimated the impact on global growth would just be 0.1% off of their latest World Economic Outlook published just a few weeks ago. So just shaving a small amount on there even in the event of a trade war, so we could still see better growth outside the U.S. next year even if we did see some form of trade war.

KATHY: Well, it seems like markets are pricing in a different scenario with U.S. stocks still leading and international stocks suffering since the election. Is that not the case?

JEFF: You're right, and this outlook may seem far-fetched with "America First" policies driving leadership by U.S. small caps since Election Day, while international stocks and especially emerging-market stocks have really lagged pretty badly since Election Day. But that's exactly what happened after Trump won in 2016, but it completely reversed in 2017, the first full year of Trump's term. Despite risk of tariffs and the uncertainty of a Trump administration, emerging-market stocks rose nearly 40% in 2017, led by 56% gains in China. That was followed by outperformance of international stocks, with U.S. small caps the worst performers. And the reason that happened was better global growth in 2017 that lifted more economically sensitive stocks, and that echoes our outlook for 2025.

KATHY: So we talked about tariffs. What are some of the other risks to the outlook for international stocks?

JEFF: Well, there's a few—certainly market leadership is one of those. If the market remains focused on U.S. tech-driven AI leadership in the market, it'll be hard for international stocks to lead. They just don't have a lot of exposure there. A rotation in leadership to sectors like financials, a classic rate-cutting beneficiary, would certainly help. Financials are more prevalent in non-U.S. stock markets, so just having the financial sector outperform would boost performance outside the U.S. It's interesting to note that financials did begin to outperform in the second half of 2024 outside the U.S., and that could be a sign of things to come next year. So that's one thing.

The second is central banks. I think the market is highly confident in rate cuts by major central banks throughout the first half of 2025. But, you know, just looking around the world, Brazil's central bank has been hiking rates lately in recent months. And over the past few years, Brazil has been a leading indicator of other central banks as the first to hike rates in 2021, about a year ahead of the Fed and many other central banks—and the first to cut in 2023, also about a year ahead of the Fed. Now recently they've started to hike again. Inflation in Brazil bottomed in the middle of 2023 at 3.2%. It's now back up to 4.7. 

And inflation rose across most major countries in the latest readings. The market still seems to be though confident that major central banks will continue to cut rates until mid-2025, but Brazil might be signaling what could come if inflation creeps higher and hiking cycles get cut short. That's not our base case, which includes a steady pace of cuts by the European Central Bank and many other global central banks around the world—but it is a potential risk next year if central banks can't deliver those rate cuts the markets are expecting.

And then finally, I guess I'd also note geopolitics. The conflicts surrounding Ukraine and Israel continue to exact an immeasurable human toll—but the market and economic impacts have been limited, with oil prices wrapping up the year close to their lows. And ceasefire agreements might take place in 2025, but the conflicts could linger on or even expand. And should oil facilities in Russia or Iran be targeted, oil prices could surge and act as a drag on growth and a boost to inflation. Again, this seems unlikely, but a risk we'll be monitoring along with the potential for supply chain disruptions.

Other risks in the news lately, like the dramatic budget battles in France and South Korea and Germany, are not likely to distract tremendously from the improving growth outlook. I don't think they're going to be a big disruption there in those economies in 2025, but they'll certainly continue to make for some interesting headlines.

KATHY: Interesting headlines indeed. I think the word for 2025 so far is "uncertainty." Sounds like we have a lot of that in the international markets as well.

So Jeff, this has been great. Thanks for being here.

JEFF: My pleasure, thanks for having me.

LIZ ANN: Well, Kathy, I know this has been a lot of material for our listeners, but it's also some of our most-requested information. So to our listeners, if you have enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. And remember, check out schwab.com/learn to get the full written reports for all of our 2025 market outlooks.

KATHY: And if you want to keep up with the charts and data we post in real time, you can follow us both on X or LinkedIn. I'm at @KathyJones. That's Kathy with a K on X and LinkedIn.

LIZ ANN: And I'm @LizAnnSonders, make sure it's actually me: L I Z A N N S O N D E R S. I have had a rash of imposters on so many other social media sites. If you see me on Instagram or Facebook, or WhatsApp, I promise you that is not me. It's an imposter. So don't get duped.

KATHY: Thanks for listening, and next week we'll be back with part two of our 2025 market outlook with a focus on the fixed income market.

For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/OnInvesting, where you can also find the transcript.