It's not going to be a great year. Still, investors can make fairly good returns if they're careful. The biggest example is the Japanese bond market. Some peripheral European bond markets have also fully discounted the opportunities without taking notice of the risks. This year, Wall Street will be the wild card.
Every conceivable scenario is plausible.
So will the Italian bond market. There is massive corporate restructuring going on, as concepts such as corporate governance and shareholder value take hold. The model for continental Europe is Japan. There is a struggle to sustain economic recovery and a bias towards monetary easing, which is good for stocks. But the best risk-reward ratio is in Britain.