Uncertainty Prevails

This is now the seventh Industry Watch, covering 21 months, where COVID-19 has been the main issue influencing market values and trends.

At one stage it looked as though vaccines would allow a return to a semblance of normality, but the slow roll-out and the emergence of the highly infectious Delta variant has changed that view for now.

Given the differing impact of COVID at a given time on regions and industries and, as we are entering the last quarter of 2021, it is useful to compare the performance year to date in both our usual selected world markets (Chart 1) and separately in markets in some other countries (Chart 2).

As can be seen there is some inconsistency – in North America the average growth in market values is +17.5%, in Europe +13.8% and in Asia -0.8%.