In reality it is hard to do more than acknowledge that the dollar will be fairly weak for a while yet. So stay away.Finally currencies: here the issue is whether the dollar decline against the euro (maybe one should say the euro rise against the dollar) continues or reverses Here the professionals are divided. The only case for such investment would be were deflation to take hold and the central banks be unable to stop it. Now, it may well be that during the next cycle, towards the end of this decade, this will happen But it is surely unlikely next year Indeed the risks are rather in the other direction. If the world recovery is indeed to take hold and if short-term rates are going to rise to meet it, then this is not going to be a great environment to invest in bonds In any case yields are still low.

I liked the start of a section on that in the Barclays report: “Investors will have to be very careful in the bond market.” It goes on to identify relative value in the various world markets but adds: “In general, we do not recommend taking any duration risk.”That must be right. Well, mercifully, we are not quite in that sort of mess – or indeed 1929 to 1931, another catastrophic period, or 1914 to 1916, an even worse one. In any case, after all those dreadful periods there were several years of pluses. So maybe Goldman Sachs is right to be hopeful about share prices next year: at least history is on their side.The second area of comment is bonds. Most of the write-offs are now past, with the 2001-2003 aftermath of the internet and telecom bubbles making a parallel with the write-offs from the industrial restructuring that took place in the early 1990s. Some companies such as Unilever and Ryanair are in the first category, Air France and EMI in the latter.

Interesting, isn’t it, that Ryanair now is classified as a big company and Air France as a smaller one?For the US, Goldman Sachs expects a further recovery in share prices but a less intense one than in recent months. Looking at European markets as a whole, it thinks the coming year will see a return of large capital companies and high quality ones. It picks out some large companies that have lagged the market and some smaller ones that have run too far ahead. A typical profile of the likely rises is set out in the third graph, taken from Barclays Capital.

Aside from the UK leading the rate rises and reaching 5 per cent, the bank also thinks that US rates and euro rates will cross over around the end of next year, so that US rates will again be higher than Continental ones. There is some debate, by the way, about the path of euro rates: one bank at least, HSBC, thinks that euro rates will fall before they rise but I suppose that depends a lot on what happens to the dollar and the euro.The sequence of the UK first, then the US, then the euro, would be consistent with the economic forecasts of a more general recovery next year, with the US and UK having another quite reasonable year and the eurozone eventually joining them with some more modest growth.So what does this mean for shares? Some work by Goldman Sachs gives a good base from which to start. Put another way, you also did better by shifting investments towards growth companies and cyclical ones, rather than buying stodgy “defensive” stocks.That is the past. What of the future? Everyone agrees that next year will be one of rising interest rates, with sterling rates rising first, then dollar rates and finally euro ones. Bonds, however have been disappointing, making the conventional risk-rating of bonds as low-risk and equities as high look pretty absurd.