Jake's ViewUS Fed will continue its easy money policy in 2015, and the ECB will follow

The end of a calendar year has a way of making crystal balls appear on the desks of journalists and I cannot resist the temptation to pretend that I have one in the paperweight in front of me.

I have asked it to show me what it sees in the outlook for financial markets and, while I see only one thing there, it is all I need.

What it shows me is that the US Federal Reserve Board's promises and pledges to "taper" or even end its "quantitative easing" programme in 2015 are just so much hot air. The Fed will do no such thing and the European Central Bank will follow its easy money lead.

This will be the key to the performance of financial markets around the world next year as it has been for the past six years. The value of financial assets everywhere, excepting only North Korea, is tightly entwined into ultra-low interest rates for the US dollar and euro. Read these and you read the future.

It was famously said 60 years ago by a responsible Fed chairman (there has only been one other since that time) that the job of the Fed is to take away the punch bowl just when the party is warming up.

People still quote that line but it no longer holds true. For the past 25 years, the Fed's policy has been to pour more spirits into the punch bowl whenever it conceives even the slightest worry that the party will slow down.