Like most people who harbor generalized doubts about humanity, not much surprises me.

I often find that new readers are taken aback by my reluctance to countenance or otherwise traffic in various sorts of geopolitical counter-narrative and financial agitprop. I’m an avowed skeptic (about everything, really), but the problem with contrarian takes on geopolitics and markets is that they tend to be wrong. That’s why the payout is so high on the rare occasions they’re borne out. Being a contrarian is a good way to go broke (intellectually or financially), particularly if you don’t understand position sizing.

But even as I generally err on the side of prudence and caution when it comes to my editorial bent, if you were to have a discussion with me in person, you’d learn that I’m very amenable to pretty much any contrarian assessment you care to conjure about any subject you might care to discuss. Given that, I’m rarely surprised when the “official” narrative turns out to be wrong.

That said, I’ve been surprised a lot over the past three years, and so has everyone else. If anyone tells you they were prepared for, let alone predicted, everything that’s happened to the world so far in the 2020s, you’d be fully justified in asking why that person isn’t the richest human to ever live. Presumably, there’s a lot of money to be made in the fortune-telling business for the first person who proves it’s viable.

Personally, I hope the surprises abate going forward or, if not, that at least some of the other surprises these “Roarin’ 20s” have in store for our species turn out to be pleasant. But, coming quickly full circle, I’m skeptical because I don’t have a lot of faith in our capacity to work together in the service of preventing adverse developments.

It’s with that needlessly lengthy preamble that I thought some readers might enjoy a new list of potential bull and bear “surprises,” as enumerated by BofA’s Michael Hartnett, in the latest installment of his popular weekly “Flow Show” series. Here they are, presented without further comment:

Bull Surprises:

• Russia/Ukraine/NATO war ends,
• immigration + ChatGPT = back to disinflation,
• arms race in tech spending,
• new fiscal “bailout” culture = no recession,
• why sell when policymakers panic so easily?
• stocks less dangerous than bonds

Bear Surprises

• hard landing after ferocious Fed tightening & 430 rate hikes,
• biggest credit events set to be shadow banking & government debt,
• state intervention = lower productivity, corporate profits,
• coming China/Taiwan/US conflict,
• bulls must wait until bond market forces YCC on Fed