Thoughts on the Market Podcast Por Morgan Stanley arte de portada

Thoughts on the Market

Thoughts on the Market

De: Morgan Stanley
Escúchala gratis

Short, thoughtful and regular takes on recent events in the markets from a variety of perspectives and voices within Morgan Stanley.

© Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC Economía Finanzas Personales
Episodios
  • How Will Credit Markets Fare in 2026?

    How Will Credit Markets Fare in 2026?
    Dec 19 2025
    To conclude their two-part discussion, our Head of Corporate Credit Research Andrew Sheets and Chief Investment Officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Lisa Shalett discuss the outlook for inflation and monetary policy, with implications for investment-grade credit.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Global Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley.Lisa Shalett: And I am Lisa Shalett, Chief Investment Officer of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.Andrew Sheets: Yesterday we focused on the topic of a higher for longer inflation regime, and I was asking the questions. Today, Lisa will grill me on my views for the next year. It's Friday, December 19th at 4pm in London. Lisa Shalett: And it's 11am in New York. All right, Andrew, I'm happy to turn tables on you now. I'm very interested in your thoughts about the past year – 2025 – and looking towards 2026. In 2026, Morgan Stanley Research seems to expect a resilient global growth backdrop, with inflation moderating and central banks easing policy gradually. What do you think are the main drivers behind this more constructive inflation outlook, especially taking into account the market's prevailing concerns about persistent price pressures. Andrew Sheets: There are a couple of factors that we think are going to be near term helps for inflation, although I don't think they totally rule out what you're talking about over that longer term period.So first, we, at Morgan Stanley, are very cautious, very negative on oil prices. We think that there's going to be more supply of oil over the next year than demand for it. And so lower oil prices should help bring inflation down. There's also some measures of just how the inflation indices measure shelter and housing. And so, while we think, kind of, looking further ahead, there are some real shortages emerging in things like the rental markets – where you just haven't had a whole lot of new rental construction coming online, as you look out a year or two ahead. But in the near term, rental markets have been softer. Home prices are coming down with a lag in the data. And so, shelter inflation is relatively soft. So, we think that helps. While at the same time fiscal policy is very supportive and corporates, as we discussed in our last conversation, they're really embracing animal spirits – with more spending, more spending on AI, more capital investment generally, more M&A. And so, those factors together, we think, can over the next 12 months, still mean pretty reasonable growth and Inflation that's still above target – but at least trending a little bit lower. Lisa Shalett: You believe that central banks, including the Fed, will cut rates more slowly given better growth. And this slower pace of easing could actually be positive for the credit markets. So, could you elaborate on your expertise on credit and why a gradual Fed approach may be preferable? What risks and opportunities might this create? Andrew Sheets: Yeah, so I think this is kind of one of these big debates going into this year is – which would we rather have? Would we rather have a Fed that was more active, cutting more aggressively? Or cutting more slowly? And, indeed, we're having this conversation on the heels of a Fed meeting. There's a lot of uncertainty about that path. But the way that we're thinking about it is that the biggest risk to credit would be that this outlook for growth that we have is just too optimistic. That actually growth is weaker than expected. That this rise in the unemployment rate is signaling something far more challenging for the economy ahead and in that scenario the Fed would be justified in cutting a lot more. But I think historically in those periods where growth has deteriorated more significantly while the Fed has been cutting more, those have been periods where credit – and indeed the equity market – have actually done poorly despite more quote unquote Fed assistance. So, periods where the Fed is cutting more gradually tend to be more consistent with policy in the right place. The economy being in an okay place. And so, we think, that that's the better outcome. So again, we have to kind of monitor the situation. But a scenario where the Fed ends up doing a little bit less than the market, or even we expect with rate cuts – because the economy's holding up. That can still be, we think, an okay scenario for markets. Lisa Shalett: So, things are okay and animal spirits are returning. What does that mean for credit markets? Andrew Sheets: Yeah, so I think this is the bigger challenge: is that if our growth scenario holds up, corporates I think have a lot of incentives to start taking more risk – in a way that could be good for stock markets, but a lot more challenging to the lenders, to these companies for credit. Corporates have been impressively restrained over the last ...
    Más Menos
    8 m
  • How to Navigate a High Inflation Regime

    How to Navigate a High Inflation Regime
    Dec 18 2025
    Our Head of Corporate Research Andrew Sheets and Chief Investment Officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Lisa Shalett unpack what’s fueling persistent U.S. inflation and how investors could adjust their portfolios to this new landscape.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley. Lisa Shalett: And I'm Lisa Shalett, Chief Investment Officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. Andrew Sheets: Today, is inflation really transitory or are we entering a new era where higher prices are the norm? Andrew Sheets: It's Thursday, December 18th at 4pm in London. Lisa Shalett: And it's 11am in New York. Andrew Sheets: Lisa, it's great to talk to you again. And, you know, we're having this conversation in the aftermath of, kind of, an unusual dynamic in markets when it comes to inflation. Because inflation is still hovering around 3 percent. That's well above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. And yet the Federal Reserve recently lowered interest rates again. Fiscal policy remains very stimulative, and I think there's this real question around whether inflation will moderate? Or whether we're going to see inflation be higher for longer. And you know, you are out with a new report touching on some of the issues behind this and why this might be a structural shift higher in inflation. So, we'd love to get your thoughts on that, and we'll drill down into the various drivers as this conversation goes on. Lisa Shalett: Thanks Andrew. And look, I think as we take a step back, and the reason we're calling this a regime change is because we see factors for inflation coming from both the demand side and the supply side. For example, on the demand side, the role of the infrastructure boom, the GenAI infrastructure boom, has become global. It has caused material appreciation of many commodities in 2025. We're seeing it obviously in some of the dynamics around precious metals. But we're also seeing it in industrial metals. Things like copper, things like nickel. We're also seeing demand factors that may stem from the K-shaped economy. And the K-shaped economy, as we know, is really about this idea that the wealthiest folks are increasingly dominating consumption. And they are getting wealthy through financial asset inflation. On the supply side, there are dynamics like immigration, dynamics around the housing market that we can talk about. But perhaps the wrapper around all of it is how policy is shifting – because increasingly policymakers are being constrained by very high levels of debt and deficits. And determining how to fund those debts and deficits actually removes some of the degrees of freedom that central bankers may have when it comes to actually using interest rates to constrain demand. Andrew Sheets: Well, Lisa, this is such a great point because we're financial analysts. We're not political analysts. But it seems safe to say that voters really don't like inflation. But they also don't like some of the policies that would traditionally be assigned to fight inflation – be they higher interest rates or tighter fiscal policy. And even some of the more recent political shifts that we've seen – I’m talking about the U.S. around, say, immigration policy could arguably be further tightening of that supply side of the economy – measures designed to raise wages, almost explicitly in their policy goals. So how do you see that dynamic? And, again, kind of where does that leave, you think, policy going forward? Lisa Shalett: Yeah. I think the very short answer – our best guess is that policy becomes constrained. So, on the monetary side, we're already seeing the Fed beginning to signal that perhaps they're going to rely on other tools in the toolkit. And what are those tools in the toolkit? Well, they're managing the size of their balance sheet, managing the duration or the mix of things that they hold in the balance sheet. And it's actual, you know, returns to how they think about reserve management in the banking system. All of those things, all of those constraints may enable the U.S. government to fund debts, right? By buying the Treasury bill issuance, which is, you know, swollen to almost [$]2 trillion a year in terms of U.S. deficits. But on the fiscal side, right, the interest payments on debt, begins to crowd out other government spending. So, policy itself in this era of fiscal dominance becomes constrained – both in, you know, Washington, D.C. and from Congress – what they can do, their degrees of freedom – and what the central bank can do to actually control inflation. Andrew Sheets: Another area that you touch on in your report is energy and technology, which are obviously related with this large boom that we're seeing – and continue to expect in AI data center construction. This is a lot of spending on the technology...
    Más Menos
    12 m
  • U.S. Policy Breaks Past Peak Uncertainty

    U.S. Policy Breaks Past Peak Uncertainty
    Dec 17 2025
    Our Public Policy Strategists Michael Zezas and Ariana Salvatore break down key moves from the White House, U.S. Congress and Supreme Court that could influence markets 2026.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michael Zezas: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Global Head of Fixed Income Research and Public Policy Strategy.Ariana Salvatore: And I'm Ariana Salvatore, U.S. Public Policy Strategist.Michael Zezas: Today we'll be talking about the outlook for U.S. public policy and its interaction with markets into 2026.It's Wednesday, December 17th at 10:30am in New York.So, Ariana, we published our year ahead outlook last month. And since then, you've been out there talking to clients about U.S. public policy, its interaction with markets, and how that plays into 2026. What sorts of topics are on investors' minds around this theme?Ariana Salvatore: So, the first thing I'd say is clients are definitely interested in our more bullish outlook, in particular for the U.S. equity market. And normally we would start these conversations by talking through the policy variables, right? Immigration, deregulation, fiscal, and trade policy. But I think now we're actually post peak uncertainty for those variables, and we're talking through how the policy choices that have been made interact with the outlook.So, in particular for the equity market, we do think that some of the upside actually is pretty isolated from the fact that we're post peak uncertainty on tariffs, for example. Consumer discretionary – the double upgrade that our strategists made in the outlook has very little to do with the policy backdrop, and more to do with fundamentals, and things like AI and the dollar tailwind and all of all those factors.So, I think that that's a key difference. I would say it's more about the implementation of these policy decisions rather than which direction is the policy going to go in.Michael Zezas: Picking up on that point about policy uncertainty, when we were having this conversation a year ago, right after the election, looking into 2025, the key policy variables that we were going to care about – trade, fiscal policy regulation – there was a really wide range of plausible outcomes there.With tariffs, for example, you could make a credible argument that they weren't going to increase at all. But you could also make a credible argument that the average effective tariff rate was going to go up to 50 or 60 percent. While the tariff story certainly isn't over going into 2026, it certainly feels like we've landed in a place that's more range bound. It's an average effective tariff rate that's four to five times higher than where we started the year, but not nearly as high as some of the projections would have. There's still some negotiation that's going on between the U.S. and China and ways in which that could temporarily escalate; and with some other geographies as well. But we think the equilibrium rate is roughly around where we're at right now.Fiscal policy is another area where the projections were that we were going to have anything from a very substantial deficit expansion. Tax cuts that wouldn't be offset in any meaningful way by spending cuts; to a fiscal contraction, which was going to be more focused on heavier spending cuts that would've more than offset any tax cuts. We landed somewhere in between. It seems like there's some modest stimulus in the pipe for next year. But again, that is baked. We don't expect Congress to do much more there.And in terms of regulation, listen, this is a little bit more difficult, but regulatory policy tends to move slowly. It's a bureaucratic process. We thought that some of it would start last year, but it would be in process and potentially hit next year and the year after. And that's kind of where we are.So, we more or less know how these variables have become something closer to constants, and to your point, Ariana now it's about observing how economic actors, companies, consumers react to those policy choices. And what that means for the economy next year.All that said, there's always the possibility that we could be wrong. So, going back to tariffs for a minute, what are you looking at that could change or influence trade policy in a way that investors either might not expect or just have to account for in a new way?Ariana Salvatore: So, I would say the clearest catalyst is the impending decision from the Supreme Court on the legality of the IEEPA tariffs. I think on that front, there are really two things to watch. The first is what President Trump does in response. Right now, there's an expectation that he will just replace the tariffs with other existing authorities, which I think probably should still be our base case. There's obviously a growing possibility, we think, that he actually takes a lighter touch on tariffs, given the concerns around affordability. And then the second thing I would say is on the refunds ...
    Más Menos
    11 m
Todavía no hay opiniones