FINANCIAL markets will always produce surprises. After all, by the time a consensus has formed, people will have bought or sold accordingly. The move has already happened; the future has something else in store.

Even accounting for this, investors have had an unusually difficult time in 2023. The year started with broad agreement that 2022’s soaring interest rates would cause recessions in much of the world. Not only was this baked into asset prices – it also turned out to be wrong.

Yet it was not just economic assumptions that were overturned. Here are the other big market surprises of 2023.