# 2024 - The Financial Year in Review

An episode of [Patrick Boyle On Finance](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1547740313), 1 Jan 2025, 21 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO9907633304.mp3

Here's a look back on some of the most impactful events in markets during 2024. Patrick's Books: Statistics For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3eerLA0 Derivatives For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3cjsyPF Corporate Finance: https://amzn.to/3fn3rvC Ways To Support The Channel Patreon: / patrickboyleonfinance Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/patrickb... Visit our website: https://www.onfinance.org Follow Patrick on Twitter Here: https://bsky.app/profile/pboyle.bsky.... Business Inquiries ➡️ sponsors@onfinance.org

## Transcript

[0:00] 2024 was an eventful year in both finance and rap music.
[0:05] Just a year ago, when people mentioned the Met Gala, we
[0:08] assumed that they were referring to the annual charity fashion
[0:11] event in New York. Just one year later, we assumed
[0:14] that they're talking about lunchtime at the Metropolitan
[0:17] Detention Centre in Brooklyn, where SBF Diddy and Luigi
[0:21] Mangioni host one of the most exclusive parties in the world.
[0:26] It's one of the few parties where it's harder to leave than
[0:29] to get in, and who knows who'll be on the guest list next year.
[0:33] 2024 was a year of wars, elections, natural disasters.
[0:38] We saw solar eclipses, bridge collapses, and worried about
[0:42] mysterious drones. Jay-Z realized that he had
[0:45] reached 100 problems this year, and the less that we say about
[0:49] that, the better. 2024 got off to a dramatic start when on New
[0:54] Year's Day, Japan was shaken by a 7 1/2 magnitude earthquake
[0:59] which collapsed buildings, caused fires and triggered
[1:02] tsunami alerts, prompting orders to evacuate coastal areas of
[1:06] Japan. Later that month we learned that
[1:10] while air travel is the safest form of mass transportation,
[1:14] that's only the case when the airplanes doors have been
[1:17] properly attached. Early in January, an Alaska
[1:20] Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing when a
[1:24] door plug fell off of the plane mid air.
[1:27] Boeing stock price fell 10% that day as investors worried that
[1:32] the planes had the build quality of a cyber truck.
[1:35] Fortunately, none of the passengers or crew experienced
[1:38] serious injuries, but one YouTube did get his fingers
[1:42] stuck in the door of the luggage compartment.
[1:45] Towards the end of January, a Delaware judge ruled against
[1:48] Elon Musk's $56 billion pay package, ruling that the share
[1:53] grant was a controller conflicted transaction as
[1:56] Tesla's directors were not independent, did not engage in
[2:00] an arm flank negotiation, and that the shareholder vote was
[2:04] not fully informed of these conflicts.
[2:07] Following the decision, Musk redomiciled Tesla in Texas and
[2:11] held a follow up vote asking investors to ratify the original
[2:16] options grant. While 70% of Tesla investors
[2:20] voted in Musk's favour, the court rejected this vote, saying
[2:24] that no Delaware court had ever reversed its judgement based on
[2:28] a stockholder vote that took place after a trial.
[2:32] This judgement will likely be appealed to the Delaware Supreme
[2:35] Court next year. 2024 was a big year for elections. 76 countries
[2:42] containing over half of the world's population held
[2:45] elections this year. In February, we saw elections in
[2:48] El Salvador, Pakistan, Finland, and Indonesia.
[2:53] More people voted this year than ever before.
[2:56] Germany's parliament voted in February to decriminalize
[3:00] cannabis, which is not expected to help with the country's long
[3:03] term decline in productivity, but it is expected to help grow
[3:07] its burgeoning tie dye T-shirt industry.
[3:11] Everyone was talking about the weight loss drug Ozempic in
[3:14] 2024. Oprah Winfrey announced in
[3:17] February that she was taking the drug and stepped down from the
[3:21] board of Weight Watchers, sending the company shares into
[3:25] a tailspin. Kate Moss famously said that
[3:28] nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
[3:31] James Corden, on the other hand, discovered that sausages taste
[3:35] better than Ozempic. He told the press that he tried
[3:38] Ozempic and it didn't work. Now look, I know it's a bit of a
[3:42] mean joke, but it is James Corden, the guy who famously
[3:46] yelled at a waitress so much a few years ago that she needed
[3:49] therapy after serving him. I watched one of his Carpool
[3:53] karaoke videos when researching this and it was so awful that I
[3:57] possibly need therapy too to get over it.
[3:59] He had it coming. The most hyped product of the
[4:03] year, the Apple Vision Pro, was released in February, too.
[4:07] It was a bit like Google Glass, which came out 15 years earlier
[4:11] and flopped because people found it weird and creepy.
[4:14] So Apple decided to make something bigger, weirder,
[4:17] creepier, and more ridiculous. Social media was filled with
[4:21] images of people wearing it in public and behaving strangely.
[4:25] It was soon the most returned product in Apple history, and
[4:29] there are now rumors that it's about to be cancelled because,
[4:33] well, look at it. In March, Donald Trump, who,
[4:37] spoiler alert, we'll hear more about later in this video, won a
[4:41] Supreme Court decision overturning a Colorado ruling
[4:44] that he was not eligible to run for president.
[4:47] The next day Nikki Haley dropped out of the race, ceding the
[4:51] Republican nomination to Trump after suppressing and murdering
[4:55] opponents. As is tradition in Russia,
[4:58] Vladimir Putin won 87.8% of the Russian vote, the highest ever
[5:04] result in Russia's post Soviet history.
[5:06] Now say what you will about the guy, he is popular.
[5:09] Not not as popular as Kim Jong Un, but still quite popular.
[5:14] A cargo ship hit a bridge in Maryland in March, causing the
[5:18] entire 1.6 mile long structure to collapse.
[5:22] Between this and the ship that blocked the Suez Canal a few
[5:25] years ago, these ships are getting completely out of
[5:28] control and something needs to be done about them.
[5:31] Sam Bankman Freed, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March
[5:35] after being convicted of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.
[5:39] With SBF out of the picture, politicians worried about who
[5:43] would fund their election campaigns.
[5:45] Later in the year we learned that it would be other crypto
[5:48] guys who haven't been sent to prison yet.
[5:52] Tech layoffs were a big news story.
[5:54] In March, 130,000 tech workers lost their jobs across 457
[6:00] different companies. This year, the viral video app
[6:03] TikTok was ordered to be sold by its Chinese parent company or be
[6:08] banned. And Donald Trump IPO Ed his
[6:11] version of Twitter Truth Social on the same day that he
[6:15] announced the release of his Trump branded Bibles.
[6:18] Bibles were not the only presidential merch this year.
[6:22] Gold, trainers and watches were released a few months later.
[6:26] In April, South Korea's opposition party won a landslide
[6:31] majority in the country's general election.
[6:34] This was a defeat for the sitting president, whose decline
[6:37] in popularity was blamed on a bag of spring onions.
[6:40] He made the oldest political mistake in the book by visiting
[6:44] a supermarket and saying that a bundle of spring onions were
[6:47] reasonably priced. Usually politicians are tricked
[6:51] into making mistakes like this. A journalist will ask them how
[6:55] much a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk costs.
[6:57] They'll give the wrong price and be shown to be completely out of
[7:01] touch. This was the first time in
[7:04] political history that a politician set the very trap
[7:07] that they fell into. The same month Donald Trump
[7:11] stood trial on criminal charges in a hush money case in New York
[7:15] and NASA engineers managed to successfully repair and recode
[7:20] Voyager 1 from 15 billion miles away.
[7:23] After a 5 month gap in not receiving data, Amazon's retail
[7:28] stores that claimed to use technology which allowed
[7:31] customers to just grab items from a store shelf and walk out
[7:35] without the need for checkouts was revealed to be just Indian
[7:39] workers watching CCTV footage. A reminder that AI isn't always
[7:44] what it seems. And do try to remember that when
[7:47] using one of those AI image generators, as you might be
[7:51] making a badly paid Workers Day really tough when you ask for a
[7:55] particularly bizarre image. In May, President Biden
[7:59] announced that he was quadrupling US tariffs on
[8:02] Chinese EVs from 25% to 100% to encourage Americans who were
[8:08] already not buying Chinese EVs to continue not buying them.
[8:13] And so far, that strategy appears to be working.
[8:17] In rap news, Kendrick Lamar's diss track Not Like Us became
[8:21] his fourth number one. Now, while I haven't gotten
[8:24] around to listening to it yet, it is one of my goals for 2025
[8:29] unless something else comes up to distract me.
[8:31] But I'll, I'll see what I can do.
[8:33] In May, the Dow Jones Index hit 40,000 points for the first time
[8:38] ever, and Rishi Sanak announced Auk general election while
[8:43] getting soaked in a rainstorm. In June, people suddenly got
[8:47] excited about meme stocks once again as Keith Gill tweeted an
[8:51] image of a chair which signalled to GameStop investors that the
[8:55] short squeeze they'd been waiting for for years was about
[8:58] to arrive. After a bizarre YouTube live
[9:01] stream where he appeared to be dressed as Axel Rose covered in
[9:05] bandages, the stock price began to decline.
[9:09] It is still up 85% year to date and people on Reddit still say
[9:14] that it's a great company. I'm starting to think that every
[9:17] one of my year end videos going forward will have to contain an
[9:21] update on the price of GameStop stock along with maybe the Tesla
[9:25] to Dogecoin ratio. In 20 years time people will
[9:29] have forgotten what these things are, but it'll just be a New
[9:32] Year's tradition, like singing Auld Lang Syne.
[9:35] No one knows what it's about. It's just a thing that people
[9:37] do. Towards the end of June, we saw
[9:41] the Trump Biden debate where President Joe Biden spoke
[9:44] incoherently and appeared to repeatedly lose his train of
[9:47] thought. Viewers worried as they watched
[9:50] two men that you wouldn't trust with the remote control fight
[9:53] over who would lead the most powerful democracy in the world.
[9:57] In July, British voters turfed out the Conservatives after 14
[10:02] years in power and five prime ministers.
[10:05] I've forgotten the name of the guy who won, but it was the
[10:08] other guy. The one who didn't get rained on
[10:09] back in May 2024 was, it turns out, a year in which incumbent
[10:15] parties lost their majorities and either gave up power or held
[10:19] on through cobbled together coalitions.
[10:22] A lot of this was driven by voter frustration over
[10:25] inflation. Later in July, Donald Trump
[10:29] survived an assassination attempt while speaking at an
[10:32] open air rally in Pennsylvania. He was shot and wounded in the
[10:36] right ear, and for a short while, Trump supporters wore ear
[10:40] bandages to signal their allegiance.
[10:42] Democratic voters spent a few weeks worrying that they would
[10:45] accidentally injure their ears and have to wear a bandage and
[10:49] be shunned by their friends and families.
[10:52] Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July,
[10:56] quickly endorsing Kamala Harris and encouraging his party to
[11:00] unite behind her. August started out with a big
[11:04] market sell off, driven by the unwind of the yen carry trade.
[11:08] RFK Junior admitted to dumping a dead bear in Central Park, which
[11:12] he had found on the roadside and put in the trunk of his car
[11:16] before meeting friends for dinner.
[11:18] Apparently this solved a decade old mystery that had confused
[11:21] the NYPD. The bear story wasn't even RFK
[11:25] Junior's strangest animal story to come out over his election
[11:29] campaign. There was the whale story and
[11:31] the dog eating story too. If these are the stories that he
[11:34] casually tells people, you have to wonder what kind of things
[11:38] he's keeping secret. He announced the doctors had
[11:41] found a dead worm in his brain too.
[11:44] And brain worms are, I suppose, one of the reasons that we don't
[11:47] typically eat Rd. Kill or other street meat.
[11:51] Later in the month, RFK Junior ended his candidacy for
[11:55] president and endorsed Donald Trump.
[11:58] Harley-Davidson announced in August that they were ending
[12:02] their woke initiatives after coming under pressure from a
[12:05] ponytailed activist called Robbie Starbuck.
[12:08] I hadn't been aware of Harley Davidson's woke policies, but I
[12:12] went to their website and sure enough, they've three different
[12:15] electric motorbikes for sale. Now.
[12:18] I'm not sure if you have to write these things on the
[12:20] sidewalk or if they're allowed on the street, but this makes no
[12:23] sense for Harley-Davidson whatsoever.
[12:26] I think their entire strategy is to sell their motorbikes at cost
[12:30] price, and then all of the profits come from selling loud
[12:33] exhaust pipes as an upgrade. How can they make money with
[12:36] electric bikes? The Olympics were big news in
[12:40] August too, as a new sporting star appeared on the scene.
[12:44] Ragon, who many say is the Razzlecon of break dancing.
[12:49] In September, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 50
[12:53] basis points. This was the first rate cut in
[12:56] four years. Usually, A50 basis point cut is
[13:00] seen as a sign that the economy is either in bad shape or that
[13:04] the central bank knows that it's cutting too late.
[13:07] Powell, however, convinced investors that this was a luxury
[13:10] decision, that the Fed was cutting rates because it could.
[13:15] The same month, pharma bro Martin Shkreli was ordered by a
[13:19] federal judge to turn over all copies of the Wu Tang clan's
[13:23] unreleased rap album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
[13:27] It was something to do with crypto and was too boring for me
[13:30] to read the full article about, but it did happen and now you
[13:34] know about it. Towards the end of the month, a
[13:37] series of videos began to spread on TikTok in which finfluencers
[13:41] claimed that you could withdraw large sums of money from ATM
[13:45] machines by depositing checks for money that you don't
[13:48] actually have and then withdrawing a portion of those
[13:51] sums before the bank realized. They called this the infinite
[13:55] Money glitch, but federal prosecutors later renamed it
[13:58] Check Fraud. There was a second assassination
[14:02] attempt against Donald Trump in September.
[14:05] The assassin hid in the bushes at a golf course wearing a pink
[14:08] T-shirt. He was by no means a master of
[14:11] disguise. You have to be impressed by
[14:13] Trump's street smarts as after this event he was rarely seen on
[14:18] stage without RFK Junior being present, figuring that it made
[14:22] sense to have a Kennedy on stage to draw the sniper fire.
[14:26] In October, we saw the Trump Harris debate in which the two
[14:30] candidates took a break from their part time jobs at
[14:33] McDonald's to discuss all of the big issues facing America.
[14:37] They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're
[14:40] eating the cats, they're eating, they're eating the pets of the
[14:45] people that live there. After the debate, the media
[14:49] discussed whether immigrants were actually eating the dogs
[14:52] and cats in Springfield. It turned out to have mostly
[14:55] been RFK Junior, who's not an immigrant, and he claims that it
[14:59] was a goat, not a dog. In November, Sean Puff Daddy P
[15:04] Diddy Sean John Diddy Combs was arrested on charges of behaving
[15:09] like the Tate brothers and possession of enough baby oil to
[15:13] fill a swimming pool. His punishment was to be locked
[15:16] up with Sam Bankman Freed, who's alleged to have stopped
[15:19] showering more than three years ago.
[15:22] Caroline Ellison, the fraudster and star witness at the FTX
[15:26] case, was sentenced to two years in prison this November.
[15:30] This is far from the woods where she and her kind call home, so
[15:34] it should be quite hard for her. Internet forum moderator Elon
[15:39] Musk came out in support of Donald Trump in the lead up to
[15:42] the US elections, spending over 1/4 of a billion dollars on the
[15:46] election. When Trump won in November, Musk
[15:50] was rewarded with a government job.
[15:53] Later that month, we learned that Mark Zuckerberg, who in
[15:56] 2024 surprised the world by dressing as a human, had
[16:00] collaborated with auto tune rapper T Pain to release a
[16:04] ghastly cover version of the song Get Low.
[16:07] I'd strongly advise against listening to it.
[16:10] I tried to describe it to you, but as a defensive mechanism to
[16:14] preserve my sanity, my brain has wiped it entirely from my
[16:17] memory. The biggest news event of the
[16:20] year came in November, when crypto rapper Razzlecon was
[16:24] sentenced to 18 months in prison over a 2016 Bitcoin hack.
[16:29] This is, of course, a huge loss to the crypto rap community.
[16:33] Razzlecon reappeared on X the Everything app last month,
[16:38] announcing that she would be selling video messages on Cameo
[16:41] before she reports to prison in the new year.
[16:45] This video is being recorded before Christmas and I won't
[16:48] lie, the one present I'm hoping for is a personalized Razzle Can
[16:52] Wrap, which I would never sell to Martin Shkreli no matter how
[16:56] much he offers to pay. I've been dropping hints to my
[16:59] family all month. Over a span of eight days, Matt
[17:03] Gaetz, a man who would make Prince Andrew sweat, went from
[17:07] being re elected to becoming an Attorney General pick to
[17:10] ultimately bowing out before a Senate confirmation hearing.
[17:15] Who knows what shenanigans he'll get up to next year in December?
[17:20] The Hock to a girl who probably also has an actual name But
[17:24] who's going to remember that, became one of the biggest
[17:27] podcasters in the world pretty much overnight.
[17:30] After a viral St. interview she did on TikTok, she managed to
[17:35] compress the rise and fall of a modern day influencer into just
[17:39] a few months. Viral Moment podcast hang out
[17:43] with Logan Paul crypto scam and then get cancelled.
[17:47] She launched a celebrity meme coin which is a crypto token
[17:51] that people claim is funny to paper over the fact that it's
[17:54] just a scam. According to news reports, some
[17:57] Hock to a coin investors lost as much as $70,000 on their
[18:03] ill-fated investment. Now, I can't help but feel that
[18:07] if you lost money on the hook to a coin, you should probably
[18:11] consider putting any of your remaining savings in a trust
[18:14] overseen by Britney Spears's father, as otherwise things just
[18:18] aren't going to work out for you.
[18:20] Other big news in December was the online reappearance of
[18:24] Enron. We learned from meme stocks a
[18:27] few years ago that stock prices can rise due to bankruptcy, so
[18:32] it makes good financial sense to resuscitate one of the most
[18:35] famous names in corporate fraud. It is 2024 after all.
[18:40] In personal news, I started a new hobby this December when I
[18:44] bought a small fleet of drones, which I'm having a lot of fun
[18:47] with, but I do wish I could fly them without it constantly
[18:50] becoming headline news. The stock that everyone was
[18:54] talking about in 2024 was NVIDIA, which almost tripled in
[18:58] value this year. The best performing developed
[19:02] economy of the year, based on GDP growth, inflation,
[19:05] employment and the performance of its stock market was Spain,
[19:09] where both the economy and the pace of job creation are growing
[19:13] faster than the United States, whose economy has been the envy
[19:17] of the world. The British economy, on the
[19:19] other hand, struggled in 2024 with no growth in living
[19:23] standards and data showed that households were dipping into
[19:27] their savings to get by. A Lloyd survey showed that
[19:30] confidence amongst British businesses had fallen to its
[19:34] lowest level of the year this December. the US continued to
[19:38] boom in 2024, having grown at three times the pace of the rest
[19:43] of the G7 so far this decade. As of today, the US is at the
[19:47] forefront of AI, biotechnology, advanced materials,
[19:52] pharmaceutical, software and finance.
[19:55] The US stock market is up more than 27% year to date, with only
[20:00] a few days left in the year. In recent decades, China
[20:04] appeared to be catching up with the United States, and people
[20:07] wondered if China's autocratic model worked better for economic
[20:12] growth than the sometimes chaotic US democratic model.
[20:16] China's nominal GDP has fallen from about 3/4 of the size of
[20:21] America at its peak in 20/21 to 2/3 today.
[20:26] Let me finish up by thanking you guys for watching my videos this
[20:30] year. I've really enjoyed making them
[20:32] and I hope that you had a great 2024 and the 2025 is even
[20:37] better. If you enjoyed this video, you
[20:39] should watch my video on Neon the Line next and see you in the
[20:43] next video. Bye.

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