Thoughts on the Market

As inflation persists, economic concerns such as recession rise, and consumer spending patterns begin to shift, is there any evidence to suggest consumers are already trading down to value and discount products? U.S. Softlines Analyst Kimberly Greenberger and Hardlines, Broadlines and Food Retail Analyst Simeon Gutman discuss.

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Kimberly Greenberger: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Kimberly Greenberger, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Softlines Analyst. 

Simeon Gutman: And I'm Simeon Gutman, Hardlines, Broadlines and Food Retail Analyst. 

Kimberly Greenberger: And on this special episode of Thoughts on the Market, we'll be discussing shifting consumer spending patterns amid persistent inflation and concerns about the economy. It's Friday, August 12th, at 11 a.m. in New York. 

Kimberly Greenberger: As our listeners are no doubt aware, many retail segments were big pandemic beneficiaries with record sales growth and margins for 2+ years. But now that spending on goods is normalizing from high levels and consumers are facing record high inflation and worrying about a potential recession, we're starting to see signs of what's called "trade down", which is a consumer migration from more expensive products to value priced products. So Simeon, in your broad coverage, are you seeing any evidence that consumers are trading down already? 

Simeon Gutman: We're seeing it in two primary ways. First, we're seeing some reversion away from durable, high ticket items away to consumable items. And the pace of consumption of some of these high ticket durable items is waning and pretty rapidly. Some of these are items that were very strong during the pandemic, electronics, some sporting goods items, home furnishings, to name a few. So these items we're seeing material sales deceleration as one form of trade down. As another in the food retail sector, we're definitely seeing signs of consumers spending less or finding ways to spend less inside the grocery store. They can do that by trading down from national brands to private brands, buying less expensive alternative, buying frozen instead of fresh and even in the meat counter, buying less expensive forms of protein. So we're seeing it manifest in those two ways. What is the situation in softlines, Kimberly? Is your coverage vulnerable to trade down risk? 

Kimberly Greenberger: Absolutely. In softlines retail, which is apparel, footwear, accessories retail, these are discretionary categories. Yes, there's sort of a minimum level of spending that's necessary because clothing is part of the essentials, food, shelter, clothing. But Americans' closets are full and they're full because last year there was a great deal of overspending on the apparel category. So where we have seen trade down impact our sector this year, Simeon, is we have seen consumers budget cutting and moving away from some of those more discretionary categories like apparel especially. We just have not yet seen any benefits to some of the more value oriented retailers that we would expect to see in the future if this behavior persists. 

Simeon Gutman: So when we're thinking about the context of our collaborative work with other Morgan Stanley sector analysts around trade down risks, what do you hear, Kimberly, about the impact on segments such as household products and restaurants? 

Kimberly Greenberger: We have found most fascinating, actually, the study of those real high frequency purchases. Because in order to understand how consumer behavior is changing at the margin, we think it's most important to look at what consumers were spending on last week, two weeks ago, three weeks ago as a better indication of what they're likely to spend on for the next three or six months. How that behavior has been changing is that on those of very high frequency purchases like the daily tobacco purchase or the daily food at home purchase, as you mentioned, is that there is trade down from higher priced brands and products into more value oriented brands and products. The same thing is happening in fast food. Another category that we consume on a somewhat more frequent basis than, for example, eating in casual dining restaurants where we're sitting down for a meal. So now we've got a good number of months of evidence that this is, in fact, happening, and that gives us more conviction that it's likely to continue through the second half of the year. So Simeon, in your view, what parts of retail are the likely winners and laggards should this trade down behavior persist and broaden out, particularly if a recession did materialize? 

Simeon Gutman: So in the event of a recession, I think the typical answers here are a little bit easier to identify. The two big beneficiaries, the channel beneficiaries, would be the dollar slash discount stores and then secondarily, off price. First, the dollar and discount stores, they are already seeing some initial signs of trade down and that is mostly in the consumable area. That is the place where the consumer feels the pinch immediately. The other piece of it is the discretionary spend. The longer these conditions persist, high inflation and potential other pressures on the consumer, then you'll start to see a more pronounced trade down and shift of discretionary purchases. And that's where off price plays a role. 

Kimberly Greenberger: Simeon, thanks so much for taking the time to talk. 

Simeon Gutman: Great speaking with you, Kimberly. 

Kimberly Greenberger: As a reminder, if you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcasts app. It helps more people to find the show. 

As bitcoin has been experiencing a steep decline in the last 6 months, investors are beginning to wonder when Cryptocurrencies will finally bottom out and start the cycle anew.

Digital assets, sometimes known as cryptocurrency, are a digital representation of a value that function as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, or a store of value, but generally do not have legal tender status. Digital assets have no intrinsic value and there is no investment underlying digital assets. The value of digital assets is derived by market forces of supply and demand, and is therefore more volatile than traditional currencies’ value. Investing in digital assets is risky, and transacting in digital assets carries various risks, including but not limited to fraud, theft, market volatility, market manipulation, and cybersecurity failures—such as the risk of hacking, theft, programming bugs, and accidental loss. Additionally, there is no guarantee that any entity that currently accepts digital assets as payment will do so in the future. The volatility and unpredictability of the price of digital assets may lead to significant and immediate losses. It may not be possible to liquidate a digital assets position in a timely manner at a reasonable price.

Regulation of digital assets continues to develop globally and, as such, federal, state, or foreign governments may restrict the use and exchange of any or all digital assets, further contributing to their volatility. Digital assets stored online are not insured and do not have the same protections or safeguards of bank deposits in the US or other jurisdictions. Digital assets can be exchanged for US dollars or other currencies, but are not generally backed nor supported by any government or central bank.

Before purchasing, investors should note that risks applicable to one digital asset may not be the same risks applicable to other forms of digital assets. Markets and exchanges for digital assets are not currently regulated in the same manner and do not provide the customer protections available in equities, fixed income, options, futures, commodities or foreign exchange markets.

Morgan Stanley and its affiliates do business that may relate to some of the digital assets or other related products discussed in Morgan Stanley Research. These could include market making, providing liquidity, fund management, commercial banking, extension of credit, investment services and investment banking.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Sheena Shah, Lead Cryptocurrency Strategist for Morgan Stanley Research. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, today I address the question everyone seems to be asking about the crypto cycle: when will crypto prices find a bottom? It's Thursday, August 11th, at 5 p.m. in London. 

After a 75% peak to trough fall in bitcoin's price between November 2021 and June this year, it seems like almost everyone in the market is asking the same question. When will crypto prices find the bottom? We will discuss three topics related to this question; the pace of new bitcoin creation, past bitcoin cycles and dollar liquidity. 

What can bitcoin's creation tell us about where we are in the crypto cycle? Bitcoin's relatively short history means there is little available data, and yet the data is quite rich. In its short 12 year history, bitcoin has experienced at least 10 bull and bear cycles. Bitcoin creation follows a 4 year cycle. Within these 4 year cycles, price action has so far followed three distinct phases. First, there is a rapid and almost exponential rise in price. Second, at a peak in price, a bear market follows. And third, prices move sideways, eventually leading into a new bull market. 

The question for investors today is, is bitcoin's price moving out of the second phase and into the third? Only time will tell. There have only been three of these halving cycles in the past, and so it is difficult to conclude that these cycles will repeat in the future. 

What about past bear markets? The 75% peak to trough fall in bitcoin's price and this cycle is currently faring better than previous cycles, in which the falls after peaks in 2011, 2013 and 2017 ranged between 85 and 95%. There is, therefore, speculation about whether this cycle has further to drop. 

Previous cycles have shed similar characteristics. In the bull runs there was speculation about the potential of a particular part of the crypto ecosystem. In 2011, it was the excitement about Bitcoin and the development of ecosystem technologies like exchanges and wallets. In 2020 to 2021, this cycle, there were NFTs, DeFi and the rising dominance of the institutional investor. 

In previous cycles, the bear runs were triggered by regulatory clampdowns or a dominant exchange being hacked. In 2013, a crackdown in China led to the world's largest exchange at that time, BTC China, stopping customer deposits. In this cycle, the liquidity tap dried up as inflation concerns gripped the market. 

Central bank liquidity and government stimulus fueled the speculation driven 2020-2022 crypto cycle. For this reason, day to day crypto traders are focusing on what the U.S. Federal Reserve plans to do with its interest rates and availability of dollars. 

To find a bottom, there are two liquidity related factors to look out for. First, market expectations that central banks will continue to tighten the money supply, turn into expectations that central banks will resume monetary expansion. Second, crypto companies increase appetite to build crypto leverage again. Both of these would increase liquidity and drive a new cycle of speculation. 

Which brings us back to the question about the bottom of the crypto cycle that almost everyone is asking: are we there yet? To answer that question, look at bitcoin creation, past cycles and above all, liquidity. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed Thoughts on the Market, share this and other episodes with a friend or colleague today. 

The Senate just passed the Inflation Reduction Act which seeks to fight inflation on a variety of fronts, but the most pressing question is, will the IRA actually impact inflation?

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Michael Zezas: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Morgan Stanley's Head of U.S. Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy. 

Ellen Zentner: And I'm Ellen Zentner, Morgan Stanley's Chief U.S. Economist. 

Michael Zezas: And on this special episode of Thoughts on the Market, we'll discuss the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, with a focus on its impact on the U.S. economic outlook. It's Wednesday, August 10th, at noon in New York. 

Michael Zezas: So, Ellen, the Senate just passed the Democrats Inflation Reduction Act on a party line vote. And we know this has been a long awaited centerpiece to President Biden's agenda. But let me start with one of the more pressing questions here; from your perspective, does the Inflation Reduction Act reduce inflation? Or maybe more specifically, does it reduce inflation in a way that impacts how the Fed looks at inflation and how markets look at inflation? 

Ellen Zentner: So for it to impact the Fed today and how the markets are looking at inflation, it really has to show very near term effects here, where the IRA focuses more on longer term effects on inflation. So today we've got recent inflation report that came out this week showing that inflation moved lower, so softened. Especially showing the effects of those lower energy prices, which everyone notices because you go and gas up at the pump and so, you know right away what inflation is doing. And that's led to some more optimism from households. That at least gives the Fed some comfort, right, that they're doing the right thing here, raising rates and helping to bring inflation down. But there's a good deal more work for the Fed to do, and we think they raise rates by another 50 basis points at their September meeting. The rates market also took note of some of the inflation metrics of late that are looking a little bit better. But still, it's not definitive for markets what the Fed will do. We need a couple of more data points over the next few months. So the IRA is just a completely separate issue right now for the Fed and markets because that's going to be in the longer run impact. 

Michael Zezas: So the bill is constructed to actually pay down the federal government deficit by about $300 billion over 10 years, and conventional wisdom is that when you're reducing deficits, you're helping to calm inflation. Is that still the case here? 

Ellen Zentner: So it's still the case in general because it means less government debt that has to be issued. But let's put it in perspective, $300 billion deficit reduction spread over ten years is 30 billion a year in an economy that's greater than 20 trillion. And so it's very difficult to see. 

Michael Zezas: Okay, so the Inflation Reduction Act seems like it helps over the long term, but probably not a game changer in the short term. 

Ellen Zentner: That's right. 

Michael Zezas: Let's talk about some of the more specific elements within the bill and their potential impact on inflation over the longer term. So, for example, the IRA extends Affordable Care Act subsidies. It also allows Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs, or at least some prescription drugs, for the first time. How do you view the impacts of those provisions? 

Ellen Zentner: So these are really the provisions that get at the meat of impacting inflation over the longer run. And I'll focus in on health care costs here. So specifically, drug prices have been quite high. Being able to lower drug prices helps lower income households, that helps older cohorts, and the cost of medical services gets a very large weight in overall consumer inflation and it gets a large weight because we spend so much on it. The other thing I'd note here, though, is that since it allows Medicare to negotiate prices for some drugs for the first time, well, that word negotiate is key here. It takes time to negotiate price changes, and that's why this bill is more something that affects longer run inflation rather than near term. 

Michael Zezas: Right. So bottom line, for market participants, this Inflation Reduction Act might ultimately deliver on its name. But if you want to understand what the Fed is going to do in the short term and how it might impact the rates markets, better off paying attention to incoming data over the next few months. It's also fair to say there's other market effects to watch emanating from the IRA, namely corporate tax effects and spending on clean energy. Those are two topics we're going to get into in podcasts over the next couple of weeks. 

Michael Zezas: Ellen, thanks for taking the time to talk. 

Ellen Zentner: Great speaking with you, Michael. 

Michael Zezas: As a reminder, if you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcasts app. It helps more people find the show.

As lending standards tighten and banks get ready to make some tough choices, how will the housing market fare if loan growth slows? Co-Heads of U.S. Securitized Products Research Jim Egan and Jay Bacow discuss.

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Jay Bacow: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jay Bacow, Co-Head of U.S. Securitized Products Research here at Morgan Stanley. 

Jim Egan: And I'm Jim Egan, the other Co-Head of U.S. Securitized Products Research. 

Jay Bacow: And on this episode of the podcast, we'll be discussing how tightening lending standards could impact housing activity. It's Tuesday, August 9th, at 11 a.m. in New York. 

Jim Egan: Now Jay, you published a high level report last week with Vishy Tirupattur, who is the Head of Fixed Income Research here at Morgan Stanley, on the coming capital crunch. Basically, rising capital pressures will mean that banks will have to make tough choices in their lending books. Is that about right? 

Jay Bacow: Yeah, that's it. Basically, we don't think that markets have really appreciated the impact of the combination of how rising rates caused losses on banks portfolios, the regulatory changes and the results of the stress test capital buffers. All of these things are going to require banks to look at the composition of not just the assets that they own, but their business models in general. Our large cap banking analyst Betsy Graseck thinks that banks are going to look at things differently to come up with different solutions depending on the bank, but in general across the industry, expects lending standards to tighten for this year and in 2023, and for loan growth to slow. So, Jim, if banks are going to tighten lending standards then what does that mean for housing activity? 

Jim Egan: I think, especially if we look at home sales, that's a negative for sales volumes and home sales are already falling. We've talked about affordability deterioration on this podcast a few times now, not just the fact of where affordability is in the housing market, but how rapidly it's deteriorating. If lending standards are going to tighten on top of those affordability pressures, then that just argues for potentially an even more substantial decrease in sales volumes going forward, and we're already seeing this in the data. Through the first half of the year new home sales are down 14% versus the first half of 2021. Purchase applications, that's our highest frequency data point that we have, they're getting progressively weaker each month. They were down 17% year over year in June, 19% year over year in July. Existing home sales, and that's referencing a much larger volume of sales then new home sales, they're down a comparatively strong 8% year to date. But with all of the dynamics that we're discussing, we believe that they're going to see a much more precipitous drop in the second half of the year. We have it down over 15% year over year versus 2021. Now, that's because of affordability pressures. It's because of the potential for tightening lending standards. It's also because of the lock in effect from a rate perspective. 

Jay Bacow: On that lock in effect, with just 2% of the market having incentive to refinance, lenders are sitting there and saying, well, what do we do in this environment where we can't just give people a rate refi? Now, you mentioned the purchase activity, that's obviously one area, but Black Knight just reported another quarterly record of untapped equity in the housing market, and consumers would love to be able to tap that. The problem is when you do a cash out refinance, you end up increasing the rate on your entire mortgage. And homeowners don't want to do that. So they'd love to do something like a home equity line of credit or second lien where they're getting charged the higher rate on just the equity they take out. But the problem is it's harder to originate those in an environment where lending standards are tightening, particularly given the capital allocation against those type of loans can be onerous. 

Jim Egan: Right. And the level of conversations around an increase in kind of the second lien or the hill market have certainly been picking up over the past weeks and months, both on the originator side, on the investor side, as people look to find ways to access that record amount of equity that you mentioned in the housing market. 

Jay Bacow: Thinking about trying, people are still trying to sell houses and you just commented on the housing activity, but what about the prices they're selling at? Some of the recent data was pretty surprising. 

Jim Egan: The most recent month of data, I think the point that has raised the most eyebrows was the average or median price of new home sales saw a pretty significant month over month decrease. We continue to see month over month increases in the median and average price of existing home sales at. When we think about average and median prices, there's a mix shift issue there. So month over month, depending on the types of homes that sell things can move. What we actually forecast, the repeat sales index Case-Shiller, we're starting to see a slowdown in growth. The past two months have been consecutive deceleration in the pace of home price growth. I think the thing that we'd highlight most is the growing geographic pervasiveness of the slowdown. Two months ago, 11 of the Case-Shiller 20 city index was showing a deceleration month over month. This past month, it was 16. Now, all 20 cities continue to show home price growth, but again, 16 are showing that pace slowdown. There is some regional specificity to this, the cities that continue to accelerate largely in Florida, Miami and Tampa to name two. 

Jay Bacow: Okay. So that's what we've seen. What do we expect to see on a go forward basis? 

Jim Egan: We talked about our expectations for sales a few minutes ago. I think the one thing that we do want to highlight is on the starts front, we think that single unit starts are going to start to decrease over the course of the back half of this year. There's a couple of reasons for that. We talked about affordability pressures, another dynamic that's been playing out in the space is that there's been a backlog not just of housing starts, but before those starts to get the completion units under construction has swollen back to 2004 levels, starts themselves are only at 1997 levels. We do think that that is going to kind of disincentivize starts going forward. We're already starting to see it a little bit in the underlying data, trailing 12 month single unit starts had plateaued for largely a year. They've been down the past two months, we think that they're going to continue to fall in the back half of this year. It's already playing through from a sentiment perspective, homebuilder confidence is down 39% from its peak in November of 2020, and that's being driven by their perception of traffic on their sites as well as their perception of future sales conditions. So we do think that starts are going to fall because a number of these dynamics. And we think that home price growth is going to remain positive and we've highlighted this on this podcast before, but the pace is going to start slowing pretty materially in the back half of this year. The most recent print was 19.7%, down from over 20%, but we think it gets all the way to 9% by December 2022, 3% by December 2023. So continued home price growth, but the pace is going to slow pretty materially. 

Jim Egan: Jay, thanks for taking the time to talk. 

Jay Bacow: Jim. Always a pleasure. 

Jim Egan: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today. 

While inflation remains high and the battle to bring it down is top of mind, there may be some opportunities in technologies that could help bring down inflation in some sectors.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Josh Pokrzywinski, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Electrical Equipment and Multi-Industry Analyst. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about deflationary opportunities in this high inflation environment. It's Monday, August 8th, at 4 p.m. in New York. 

As most listeners no doubt know, the battle to bring down inflation is the topic of 2022. But today I want to talk about inflation from a slightly different perspective, and that's how automation and productivity enhancing technologies could actually help bring down inflation in areas such as labor, supply chain procurement and energy. 

And while these technologies require capital investment, something that's often difficult when the economy is uncertain, we believe structural changes in demographics, energy policy and security, and an aging capital base make technologies focused on cost reductions and productivity actually more valuable. 

So for investors focusing on stocks that enable productivity and cost reduction through automation, efficiency, or their own declining cost curves while maintaining strong barriers to entry and attractive equity risk/reward, is something to consider. 

To dig into this, the U.S. Equity Strategy Team and equity analysts across the spectrum at Morgan Stanley Research created a deflation enabler shopping list. And that list is composed of stocks that produce tangible cost savings for their customers, where costs themselves are rising due to inflation, such as labor and energy, or scarcity, for example semiconductors or materials. In many cases, the cost of the product itself has also come down through technology or economies of scale, benefitting the purchaser and therefore adoption on both lower cost to implement and higher cost avoidance through use. 

So where should investors look? Although there are a number of deflationary companies across areas such as automation and semiconductors, we identified three major deflationary technologies which permeate across sectors and which are at long term inflection points in their importance for both enterprise and consumer. 

The first is artificial intelligence or AI. AI is proving relentless and increasingly deflationary. In biotech, AI could shorten development timelines, lower R&D spend and improve probability of success. 

The second is clean energy. My colleague Stephen Burd, who covers clean energy and utilities, has pointed out that against the backdrop of inflationary fossil fuels and utility bills, companies with deflationary clean energy technologies and high barriers to entry will be able to grow rapidly and generate increasing margins. 

And finally, mass energy storage and mobility. Although the cost of batteries have been falling for some time, competition in the space has led to heightened investment. In addition, ambitious top down government emissions goals have facilitated an exponential uplift in demand for batteries and their component raw materials. 

Although supply chains for batteries remain immature, battery storage technology is only beginning to have profound effects on society mobility, inclusivity and ultimately climate. As investment by automakers rises along with generous European subsidies aimed at staying competitive with U.S. and Chinese investment, the supply chain and innovation in new battery technologies such as solid state mean that the price should continue to fall as innovation and demand rise. 

This is extended beyond the personal vehicle market, with the cost savings and efficiency improvements driving profound changes and improvements in the range and cost of heavy duty and long haul trucking EV, and ultimately autonomous, markets. 

To sum up, in an inflationary world we believe companies that have developed deflationary products and services will become increasingly valuable, as long as they have significant barriers to entry with respect to those products and services. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

The current market pricing can tell investors a lot about what the market believes is coming next, but the future is uncertain and investors may not always agree with market expectations. Chief Cross-Asset Strategist Andrew Sheets explains.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape and how we put those ideas together. It's Friday, August 5th, at 2 p.m. in London.

Trying to predict where financial markets will go is difficult. The future, as they say, is uncertain, and even the most talented investors and forecasters will frequently struggle to get these predictions right.

A different form of this question, however, might be easier. What do markets assume will happen? After all, these assumptions are the result of thousands of different actors, most of which are trying very hard to make accurate predictions about future market prices because a lot of money is on the line. Not only is there a lot of information in those assumptions, but understanding them are table stakes for a lot of investment strategy. After all, if our view only matches what is already expected by the market to happen, it is simply much less meaningful.

Let's start with central banks, where current market pricing can tell us quite a bit. Markets expect the Fed to raise rates by another 100 basis points between now and February to about three and a half percent. And then from there, the Fed is expected to reverse course, reducing rates by about half a percent by the end of 2023. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank is expected to raise rates steadily from a current level of 0 to 1.1% over the next 12 months.

Morgan Stanley's economists see it differently in both regions. In the U.S., we think the Fed will take rates a little higher than markets expect by year end and then leave them higher for longer than markets currently imply. In the U.S., we think the Fed will take rates higher than markets expect by year end and then leave them higher for longer than is currently implied. In Europe, it's the opposite. We think the ECB will raise rates more slowly than markets imply. The idea that the Fed may do more than expected while the ECB does less is one reason we forecast the US dollar to strengthen further against the euro.

A rich set of future expectations also exists in the commodity market. For example, markets expect oil prices to be about 10% lower in 12 months time. Gasoline is priced to be about 15% lower between now and the end of the year. The price of gold, in contrast, is expected to be about 3% more expensive over the next 12 months.

I’d stress that these predictions are not some sort of cheat code for the market. The fact that oil is priced to decline 10% doesn't mean that you can make 10% today by selling oil. Rather, it means that foreign investor, a 10% decline in oil, or a 3% rise in gold will simply mean you break even over the next 12 months.

Again, all of this pricing informs our views. We forecast oil to decline less and gold to decline more than market prices imply. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley equity analysts can work backwards looking at what these commodity expectations would mean for the companies that produce them. We won't get into that here, but it's yet another way that we can take advantage of information the market is already giving us.

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you.

As investors watch to see if tensions between the U.S. and China will escalate, it’s important to understand the underlying competitive dynamic and how U.S. policy may have macro impacts.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of Public pPolicy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Thursday, August 4th, at 1 p.m. in New York.

This week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's Asia trip had the attention of many investors as they watched to see whether her actions would escalate tensions between the U.S. and China. In our view, though, this event wasn't a potential catalyst for tensions, but rather evidence of tensions that persist between the two global powers. Hence, we think investors are better served focusing on the underlying dynamic rather than any particular event.

The U.S.-China rivalry has many complicated causes, many of which we've covered on previous podcasts. But the point we want to reemphasize is this; this rivalry is going to persist. China is interested in asserting its global influence, which in ways can be at odds with how the U.S. and Europe want the international economic system to function. Nowhere is this clearer than in the policies the U.S. has adopted in recent years aimed at boosting its competitiveness with China.

The latest is the enactment of the Chips Plus Bill, which allocates over $250 billion to help US industries, in particular the semiconductor industry, to devolve its supply chain reliance on China for the purposes of economic security and to protect sensitive technologies. Policies like this have more of a sectoral effect than the macro one. But the primary market impact here being a defraying of rising costs for the semiconductor industry. But investors should be aware that there's potential policy changes on the horizon that could have macro impacts. For example, Congress considered creating an outbound investment restriction mechanism in that Chips Plus bill. Such a restriction could have significantly interrupted foreign direct investment in China with substantial consequences for China equity markets.

That provision didn't make it into this bill, and with little legislative time between now and the midterm elections, it's unlikely to resurface this year. That's cause some to conclude that it's likely to be years before such a provision could become enacted, particularly if Republicans take back control of one or both chambers of Congress creating a risk of gridlock.

But we'd caution that's too simple of a conclusion. The concept of outbound investment restrictions enjoys bipartisan support. So we think investors should be on guard for this provision to get serious consideration in 2023. We'll, of course, track it and keep you informed.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share thoughts on the market with a friend or colleague or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.

After the July FOMC meeting, markets took a quick dive and then made an immediate recovery, so what happened?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Matthew Hornbach, Global Head of Macro Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about global macro trends and how investors can interpret these trends for rates and currency markets. It's Wednesday, August 3rd, at 1 p.m. in New York. 

In the weeks since the July meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, rates and currency markets have made quite the round trip. Treasury yields from 2 out to10 year maturities fell by over 25 basis points in the three days that followed the meeting. And the U.S. dollar index declined by 2% over the same period. 

However, looking at these markets today, as I sit here recording this podcast, it's almost as if the July FOMC meeting didn't happen. 10 year Treasury yields are about where they were going into the meeting last week, and 2 year yields are a bit higher even. As for the U.S. dollar index, it's back to the range it was in ahead of the meeting. 

So what happened? Going into the meeting, investors thought that the Fed would deliver a 75 basis point rate hike, but recognized that there was a tail risk of a larger 100 basis point hike. And even if the tail risk didn't materialize, investors had acknowledged that the additional 25 basis points might be delivered in September instead. And that would make for the third 75 basis point hike in this cycle. In short, investors were positioned for a hawkish outcome. 

The FOMC statement and Chair Powell's prepared remarks didn't disappoint. The message was on par with what FOMC participants had been saying over recent weeks and months. Inflation is still top of mind, and more work is needed to bring it down to acceptable levels. If the meeting ended with Powell's prepared remarks, rates and currencies would have likely taken a different path to where they trade today. 

However, the meeting didn't end there, and the Q&A session of Powell's press conference struck a more dovish tone. Three messages contributed to this interpretation. First, Powell suggested that rates had achieved a neutral setting, or one that neither puts upward nor downward pressure on economic activity relative to its potential. 

Second, he said that because a neutral policy setting had been reached, the pace of subsequent rate hikes could soon begin to slow. 

And finally, he suggested that the committee's view of the peak policy rate in the cycle hadn't changed since the last FOMC meeting, even though inflation data since then continued to surprise on the higher side. The reason for this seemed to be focused on the deterioration in activity data or growth data. 

In many ways, investors should have expected these statements from Powell, given guidance coming from the June summary of economic projections. In addition, because Fed policy had tightened financial conditions this year, and those financial conditions helped slow economic growth, the case for a less hawkish performance might have been predictable. 

The data that arrived in the wake of the meeting underscored the recent themes of slower growth and higher inflation. But the Fedspeak that arrived in the wake of the data, well, it continued to focus on inflation, as it had done before the Fed met in July. 

Where does all of that leave the Fed on policy and us on markets? Well, the Fed's job bringing inflation down hasn't yet been accomplished, the bond market is pricing less policy tightening than the Fed is last guided towards, and downside risks to global growth are rising. As a result, we remain neutral on bond market duration, but remain bullish on the U.S. dollar, particularly against the euro. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcast app. It helps more people find the show.

As studies begin to show that obesity medications may save lives, will governments and insurances begin to consider them preventative primary care? And how might this create opportunity in pharmaceuticals? Head of European Pharmaceuticals Mark Purcell and Head of U.S. Pharmaceuticals Terence Flynn discuss.

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Mark Purcell: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mark Purcell, Head of Morgan Stanley's European Pharmaceuticals Team. 

Terence Flynn: And I'm Terence Flynn, Head of the U.S. Pharmaceuticals Team. 

Mark Purcell: And on this special episode of Thoughts on the Market, we'll be talking about the global obesity challenge and our outlook for the next decade. It's Tuesday, August the 2nd, and it's 1 p.m. in London. 

Terence Flynn: And 8 a.m. in New York. 

Terence Flynn: So Mark, more than 650 million people worldwide are living with obesity as we speak. The personal, social and economic costs from obesity are huge. The World Health Organization estimates that obesity is responsible for 5% of all global deaths, which impacts global GDP by around 3%. Obesity is linked to over 200 health complications from osteoarthritis, to kidney disease, to early loss of vision. So tackling the obesity epidemic would impact directly or indirectly multiple sectors of the economy. Lots to talk about today, but let's start with one of the key questions here: why are we talking about all this now? Are we at an inflection point? And is the obesity narrative changing? 

Mark Purcell: Yeah Terence look, there's a category of medicine called GLP-1's which have been used to treat diabetes for over a decade. GLP-1 is an appetite suppressing hormone. It works on GLP-1 receptors, you could think of these as hunger receptors, and it helps to regulate how much food our bodies feel they need to consume. Therefore, these GLP-1 medicines could become an important weapon in the fight against obesity. The latest GLP-1 medicines can help individuals who are obese lose 15 to 20% of their body weight. That is equivalent to 45 to 60% of the excess weight these individuals carry in the form of fat which accumulates around the waist and important organs in our bodies such as the liver. There is a landmark obesity study called SELECT, which has been designed to answer the following key question: does weight management save lives? An interim analysis of this SELECT study is anticipated in the next two months, and our work suggests that GLP-1 medicines could deliver a 27% reduction in the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths. We believe that governments and insurance companies will broaden the reimbursement of GLP-1 medicines in obesity if they are proven to save lives. This comes at a time when new GLP-1 medicines are becoming available with increasing levels of effectiveness. It's an exciting time in the war against obesity, and we wanted to understand the implications of the SELECT study before it reads out. 

Terence Flynn: So, our collaborative work suggests that obesity may be the new hypertension. What exactly do we mean by that, Mark? How do we size the global opportunity and what's the timeline here? 

Mark Purcell: Back in the 1960s and 1970s, hypertension was seen as a lifestyle disease caused by stress and old age. Over time, it was shown that high blood pressure could be treated, and in doing so, doctors could prevent heart attacks and save lives. A new wave of medicines were introduced to the market in the mid 1980s to treat individuals with high blood pressure and doctors found the most effective way to treat high blood pressure was to use combinations of these medicines. By the end of the 1990's, the hypertension market reached $30 billion in sales, that's equivalent to over $15 billion today adjusting for inflation. Obesity is seen by many as a lifestyle disease caused by a lack of self-control when it comes to eating too much. However, obesity is now classified as a preventable chronic disease by medical associations, just like hypertension. Specialists in the obesity field now recognize that our bodies have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to put on weight, to survive times where there is a lack of food available and a key way to fight obesity is to reset the balance of how much food our bodies think they need. With the availability of new, effective obesity medicines, we believe that obesity is on the cusp of moving into mainstream primary care management. And the obesity market is where the treatment of high blood pressure was in the mid to late 1980s. We built a detailed obesity model focusing on the key bottlenecks, patient activation, physicians engagement and payer recognition. And we believe that the obesity global sales could exceed $50 billion by the end of this decade. 

Terence Flynn: So Mark, what are the catalysts aligning to unlock the potential of this $50 billion obesity opportunity? 

Mark Purcell: We believe there are full catalysts which should begin to unlock this opportunity over the next six months. Firstly, the SELECT study, which we talked about. It could be stopped early in the next two months if GOP P1 medicines are shown overwhelmingly to save lives by reducing excess weight. Secondly, the demand for GLP-1 medicines to treat obesity was underappreciated by the pharmaceutical industry. But through the second half of this year, GLP-1 medicines, supply constraints will be addressed and we'll be able to appreciate the underlying patient demand for these important medicines. Thirdly, analysis shows that social media is already creating a recursive cycle of education, word of mouth and heightened demand for these weight loss medicines. Lastly, diabetes treatment guidelines are actively evolving to recognize important comorbidities, and we expect a greater emphasis on weight treatment goals by the end of this year. 

Terence Flynn: Mark, you mentioned some bottlenecks with respect to the obesity challenge. One of those was patient activation. What's the story there and how does social media play into it? 

Mark Purcell: Yes, great question Terence, look it's estimated that less than 10% of individuals suffering from obesity are diagnosed and actively managed by doctors. And that compares to 80 to 90% of individuals who suffer from high blood pressure, or diabetes, or high levels of cholesterol. Once patients come forward to see their doctors, 40% of them are treated with an anti-obesity medicine. And as more effective medicines become available, we just think this percentage is going to rise. Lastly, studies designed to answer the question, what benefit does 15 to 20% weight loss deliver in terms of reducing the risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease and cardiovascular disease? Will help activate governments and insurance companies to reimburse obesity medicines. But it all starts with individuals suffering from obesity coming forward and seeking help, and this is where we expect social media to play a really important key role. 

Terence Flynn: To a layperson, there's significant overlap between diabetes and obesity. How do we conceptualize the obesity challenge vis a vis diabetes, Mark? 

Mark Purcell: Terence, you're absolutely right. There is significant overlap between diabetes and obesity and it makes it difficult and complicated to model. It's estimated that between 80 to 85% of diabetics are overweight. It's estimated that 35% of diabetics are obese and around 10% of diabetics are severely obese. GLP-1 medicines have been used to treat diabetes for over a decade, not only being extremely effective in lowering blood sugar, but also in reducing the risk of cardiovascular events like heart attacks and removing excess body weight, which is being recognized as increasingly important. This triple whammy of benefit means that the use of GLP-1 medicines is increasing rapidly, and sales in diabetes are expected to reach over $20 billion this year, compared to just over $2 billion in obesity. By the end of the decade our work suggests that the use of GLP-1 based medicines in obesity could exceed the use in diabetes by up to 50%. 

Terence Flynn: Mark, thanks for taking the time to talk. 

Mark Purcell: Great speaking with you again, Terrence. 

Terence Flynn: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

As the Fed continues to surprise with large and fast interest rate increases, the market must decide, has the Fed done enough? Or is the recession already here?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, August 1st at 11 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it. 

Over the past year, the Fed has come under scrutiny for their outlook on inflation, and they've even admitted themselves that they misjudged the call when they claimed inflation would be transient. In an effort to regain its credibility, the Fed has swiftly pivoted to its most hawkish policy action since the 1980s. In fact, while we may have been the most hawkish equity strategists on the street at the beginning of the year, we never expected to see this many rate hikes in 2022. Suffice it to say, it hasn't gone unnoticed by markets with both stocks and bonds off to their worst start in many decades. 

However, since peaking in June, 10 year Treasuries have had one of their largest rallies in history, with the yield curve inverting by as much as 33 basis points. Perhaps more importantly, market based five year inflation expectations have plunged and now sit very close to the Fed's long term target of 2%. Objectively speaking, it appears as though the bond market has quickly turned into a believer that the Fed will get inflation under control. 

This kind of action from the Fed is bullish for bonds, and one of the main reasons we turned bullish on bonds relative to stocks back in April. Since then, bonds have done better than stocks, even though it's been a flat ride in absolute terms. It also explains why defensively oriented stocks have dominated the leadership board and why we are sticking with it. 

Meanwhile, stocks have rallied with bonds and are up almost 14% from the June lows. The interpretation here is that the Fed has inflation tamed, and could soon pause its rate hikes, which is usually a good sign for stocks. 

However, in this particular cycle, we think the time between the last rate hike and the recession will be shorter, and perhaps after the recession starts. In technical terms, a recession has already begun with last week's second quarter GDP release. However, we don't think a true recession can be declared unless the unemployment rate rises by at least a few percentage points. Given the deterioration in profit margins and forward earnings estimates, we think that risk has risen considerably as we are seeing many hiring freezes and even layoffs in certain parts of the economy. This has been most acute in industries affected by higher costs and interest rates and where there's payback in demand from the binge in consumption during the lockdowns. 

In our conversations with clients over the past few weeks, we've been surprised at how many think a recession was fully priced in June. While talk of recession was rampant during that sell off, and valuations reached our target price earnings ratio of 15.4x, we do not think it properly discounted the earnings damage that will entail if we are actually in a recession right now. As we have noted in that outcome, the earnings revisions which have begun this quarter are likely far from finished in both time or level. Our estimate for S&P 500 earnings going forward in a recession scenario is $195, which is likely to be reached by the first quarter of 2023. Of course, we could still avoid a recession defined as a negative labor cycle, or it might come later next year, which means the Fed pause can happen prior to the arrival of a recession allowing for that bullish window to expand. We remain open minded to any outcome, but our analysis suggests betting on the latter two outcomes is a risky one, especially after the recent rally. 

The bottom line, last month's rally in stocks was powerful and has investors excited that the bear market is over and looking forward to better times. However, we think it's premature to sound the all-clear with recession and therefore earnings risk is still elevated. For these reasons, we stayed defensively oriented in our equity positioning for now and remain patient with any incremental allocations to stocks. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcasts app. It helps more people to find the show.

One of the most common standards for investment diversification, the 60:40 portfolio, has faced challenges this year with significant losses and shifting correlations between stocks and bonds. Is this the end of 60:40 allocation?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape and how we put those ideas together. It's Friday, July 29th, at 2 p.m. in London.

The so-called 60:40 portfolio is one of the most common forms of diversified investing, based on the idea of holding a portfolio of 60% equities and 40% high-quality bonds. In theory, the equities provide higher returns over time, while the high-quality bonds provide ballast and diversification, delivering a balanced overall portfolio. But recently, we and many others have been talking about how our estimates suggested historically low returns for this 60:40 type of approach. And frequently these estimates just didn't seem to matter. Global stocks and bonds continued to hum away nicely, delivering unusually strong returns and diversification.

And then, all at once, those dour, long term return estimates appeared to come true. From January 1st through June 30th of this year, a 60:40 portfolio of U.S. equities and the aggregate bond index lost about 16% of its value, wiping out all of the portfolio's gains since September of 2020. Portfolios in Europe were a similar story. These moves raise a question: do these large losses, and the fact that they involved stock and bond prices moving in the same direction, mean that diversified portfolios of stocks and bonds are fundamentally broken in an era of tighter policy?

Now, one way that 60:40 portfolios could be broken, so to speak, is that they simply can't generate reasonable returns going forward. But on our estimates, this isn't the case. Lower prices for stocks and higher yields on bonds have raised our estimate for what this type of diversified portfolio can return. Leaving those estimates now near the 20-year average.

A bigger concern for investors, however, is diversification. The drawdown of 60:40 portfolios this year wasn't necessarily extreme for its magnitude—2002 and 2008 saw larger losses—but rather its uniformity, as both stocks and bonds saw unusually large declines.

These fears of less diversification have been given a face, the bond equity correlation. And the story investors are afraid of goes something like this. For most of the last 20 years, bond and equity returns were negatively correlated, moving in opposite directions and diversifying each other. But since 2020, the large interventions of monetary policy into the market have caused this correlation to be positive. Stock and bond prices are now moving in the same direction. The case for diversification is over.

This is a tempting story, and it is true that large central bank actions since 2020 have caused stocks and bonds to move together more frequently. But I think there's also a risk of confusing direction and magnitude. Bonds can still be good portfolio diversifiers, even if they aren't quite as good as they've been before.

Even if stocks and bonds are now positively correlated, that correlation is still well below 1 to 1. That means there are still plenty of days where they don't move together, and this can matter significantly for how a portfolio behaves, and how diversification is delivered, over time.

Another important case for 60:40 style diversification is volatility. Even after one of the worst declines for bond prices in the last 40 years, the trailing one-year volatility of the US aggregate bond index is about 6%. That is one third the volatility of U.S. stocks over the same period. Having 40% of a portfolio in something with one third of the volatility should dampen overall fluctuations. For all these reasons, we think the case for a 60:40 style approach to diversified investing remains.

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you.

Yesterday, the U.S. Federal Reserve raised interest rates by another 75 basis points. What is driving these above average rate hikes and what might the effect on markets be?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape and how we put those ideas together. It's Thursday, July 28th at 4 p.m. in London. 

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve raised rates by 75 basis points, and the Nasdaq market index had its best day since April of 2020, rising over 4%. It was a day of big moves, but also some large unanswered questions. 

A 75 basis point rise in Fed funds is large and unusual. In the last 30 years, the Fed has only raised rates by such a large increment three times. Two of those instances were at the last two Federal Reserve meetings, including the one we had yesterday. 

These large moves are happening because the Fed is racing to catch up with, and get ahead of, inflation, which is currently running at about 9% in the U.S. In theory, higher fed rate should slow the economy and cool inflationary pressure. But that theory also assumes that higher rates work with a lag, perhaps as long as 12 months. There are a couple of reasons for this, but one is that in theory, higher rates work by making it more attractive to save money rather than spend it today. Well, I checked my savings account today and let's just say the rate increases we've had recently haven't exactly shown up. So the incentives to save are still working their way through the system. 

This is part of the Fed's predicament. In hockey terms, they're trying to skate the proverbial puck, aiming policy to where inflation and the economy might be in 12 months time. But both inflation and their policy changes are moving very fast. This is not an easy thing to calibrate. 

Given that difficulty, why did the markets celebrate yesterday with both stock and bond prices rising? Well, the Fed was vague about future rate increases, raising market hopes that the central bank is closer to finishing these rate rises and may soon slow down, or pause, its policy tightening as growth and inflation slow. After all, long term inflation expectations have fallen sharply since the start of May, perhaps suggesting that the Fed has done enough. 

And as my colleague Michael Wilson, Morgan Stanley's chief investment officer and chief U.S. equity strategist, noted on Monday's podcast, markets have often seen some respite when the Fed pauses as part of a hiking cycle. But it's also important to stress that the idea that the Fed is now nearly done with its actions seems optimistic. The last two inflation readings were the highest U.S. inflation readings in 40 years, and Morgan Stanley's economists expect core inflation, which is an important measure excluding things like food and energy, to rise yet again in August. 

In short, the Fed's vagueness of future increases could suggest an all important shift. But it could also suggest genuine uncertainty on growth, inflation and how quickly the Fed's actions will feed through into the economy. The Fed has produced some welcome summer respite, but incoming data is still going to matter, significantly, for what policy looks like at their next meeting in September. 

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you. 

While midterm polls have shown a preference for republican candidates, this lead is narrowing as the election grows closer, and the full ramifications of this ever evolving race remain to be seen.

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Welcome the Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Wednesday, July 27th, at 1 p.m. in New York. 

We're still months away from the midterm elections, and polls still show strong prospects for Republicans to win back control of Congress. As we previously discussed, such an outcome could result in stalling key policy variables for markets such, as tax changes and regulations for tech and cryptocurrency. But remember not to assume that such an outcome is a sure thing. 

Take, for example, recent polls showing voters' preference for Republican congressional candidates over Democrats actually narrowing. A month ago, the average polling lead for Republicans was nearly 3%, it's now closer to 0.5%. Some independent forecasting models even now show the Democrats as a slight favorite to hold the Senate, even as they assess Democrats are unlikely to keep control of the House. The reasons for Democrats' improvement in the polls are up for debate, but that's not the point for investors. In our view, the point is that the race is still evolving and that can have market ramifications. 

Even if Democrats don't ultimately keep control of Congress, making it a closer race means markets may have to account for a higher probability that certain policies get enacted. Take corporate tax hikes, for example. Recent news suggests they're off the table, but if Democrats hold Congress, it's likely they'd be revisited as a means of funding several of their preferred initiatives. That could pressure a U.S. equity market already wary of margin pressures from inflation and slowing growth. A more constructive example is the clean tech sector. Again, reports are that the plan to allocate money to clean energy is off the table, but this could be revisited if Democrats keep control. Hence, improved Democratic prospects could benefit the sector ahead of the election. 

The bottom line is that the midterm elections are still a market factor over the next few months. We'll keep you in the loop right here about how it all plays out. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show. 

As young, digitized consumers have popularized the “Buy Now, Pay Later” payment system across global markets, there may yet be related market opportunities in Latin America.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jorge Kuri, Morgan Stanley's Latin America Financials Analyst. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the rise of Buy Now, Pay Later, or BNPL, in Latin America. It's Tuesday, July 26th, at 2 p.m. in New York. 

As many of you no doubt remember, the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were boom times for e-commerce, as quarantines made us all habitual online shoppers. This period also helped fuel the Buy Now, Pay Later payment method, which allows online shoppers the ability to make a purchase and defer payments over several installments with no fees or interest when paid on time. 

Buy Now, Pay Later first gained traction in New Zealand and Australia, then in Europe and most recently in the U.S. and now BNPL could offer a vast market opportunity in Latin America. In fact, we see volumes reaching $23 billion in Mexico and $21 billion in Brazil by 2026. 

So let's take a closer look at why. BNPL in Latin America is driven by a number of secular tailwinds, starting with favorable demographics: BNPL appeals to young, digitalized consumers who fuel the electronification of payments and e-commerce. Combine that with low credit penetration, growing consumer awareness and merchant acceptance, and you have a recipe for strong and sustainable multi-year growth. Mexico and Brazil offer the most attractive market opportunities within Latin America. 

In Mexico, the population is very young and digitalized - 65% is 39 years old or younger, and smartphone penetration among individuals 18 to 34 years is 83%. Yet the population of unbanked adults is quite large, 51% do not have a bank account and 80% do not have a credit card. Digitalization of payments is a big tailwind, as cash remains by far the most frequently used payment method, while e-commerce penetration is expected to double and reach 20% by 2026.

In Brazil, the situation is a bit different. Similar to Mexico, the population is young and digitalized. But in contrast, credit penetration is higher in Brazil, with 75% of households utilizing at least one form of credit and one or more credit cards. The ubiquity and effectiveness of PIX, the instant payments ecosystem in Brazil, combined with the large and fast growing e-commerce industry and the boom in fintech companies, could facilitate the distribution and acceptance of BNPL in the country.

It's worth noting that the BNPL opportunity does not come without risks. Delinquency risk is obvious given the unsecured nature of the product, adverse selection risks and a challenging macroeconomic environment. Most BNPL providers have some funding disadvantages and competition among both BNPL players and incumbent banks will likely ensue. Despite these various risks, BNPL remains one of the most significant multi-year trends to watch in Latin America financials. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy this show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show. 

As markets grapple with pricing in inflation, central bank rate hikes, and slowing growth, can the recent S&P 500 rally help investors gauge what may happen next for equities?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, July 25th, at 11 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it. 

Since the June lows at 3650, the S&P 500 has been range trading between those lows and 3950. However, this past week, the S&P 500 peaked its head above the 50 day moving average, even touching 4000 for a few hours. While we aren't convinced this is anything but a bear market rally, it does beg the question is something going on here that could make this a more sustainable low and even the end to the bear market? 

First, from a fundamental standpoint, we are more convicted in our view that S&P 500 earnings estimates are too high, and they have at least 10% downside from the recent peak of $240/share. So far, that forecast has only dropped by 0.5%, making it difficult for us to agree with that view that the market has already priced it. Of course, we could also be wrong about the earnings risk and perhaps the current $238 is an accurate reflection of reality. 

However, with most of our leading indicators on growth rolling over, we continue to think this is not the case, and disappointing growth remains the more important variable to watch for stocks at this point, rather than inflation or the Fed's reaction to it. Having said that, we do agree with the narrative that inflation has likely peaked from a rate of change standpoint, with commodities as the best real time evidence of that claim. We think the equity market is smart enough to understand this too, and more importantly, that growth is quickly becoming a problem. Therefore, part of the recent rally may be the equity market looking forward to the Fed's eventual attempt to save the cycle from recession. With time running short on that front. 

And looking at past cycles, there's always a period between the Fed's last hike and the eventual recession. More importantly, this period has been a good time to be long equities. In short, the equity market always rallies when the Fed pauses tightening campaign prior to the oncoming recession. The point here is that if the market is starting to think the Fed's about to pause rate hikes after this week’s, this would provide the best fundamental rationale for why equity markets have rallied over the past few weeks despite the disappointing fundamental news and why it may signal a more durable low. 

The problem with this thinking, in our view, is  it's unlikely the Fed is going to pause early enough to save the cycle. While we appreciate that investors may be trying to leap ahead here to get in front of what could be a bullish signal for equity prices remain skeptical that the Fed can reverse the negative trends for demand that are already now well-established, some of which have nothing to do with monetary policy. Furthermore, the demand destructive nature of high inflation is presenting itself today will not easily disappear even if inflation declined sharply. This is because prices are already out of reach in areas of the economy that are critical for this cycle to extend in areas like housing and autos, food, gasoline and other necessities. Secondarily, high inflation provides a real constraint for the Fed to pause or pivot, even if they decided a risk of recession was imminent. That's the main difference versus more recent cycles and why we think it remains a good idea to stay defensively oriented in one's equity positioning until further earnings disappointments are factored into consensus estimates or equity prices. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcast app. It helps more people to find the show.

This week the European Central Bank surprised economists and investors alike with a higher than anticipated rate hike, so why this hike and what comes next? Chief Cross-Asset Strategist Andrew Sheets and Chief European Economist Jens Eisenschmidt discuss.

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Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. 

Jens Eisenschmidt: And I'm Jens Eisenschmidt, Morgan Stanley's Chief Europe Economist. 

Andrew Sheets: And on this special episode of Thoughts on the market will be discussing the recent ECB rate hike and the path ahead. It's Friday, July 22nd at 4 p.m. in London. 

Andrew Sheets: So, Jens, I want to talk to you about the ECB's big rate decision yesterday. But before we do that, I think we should start by laying the scene of the European economy. In a nutshell, how is Europe's economy doing and what do you think are the most salient points for investors to be aware of? 

Jens Eisenschmidt: Great question, Andrew. We have revised downwards our growth outlook for the euro area economy on the back of the reduced gas flow coming out from Russia into Germany starting at some point in mid-June. And we are now seeing a mild recession for the euro area economy setting in towards the end of this year and the beginning of next. This is in stark contrast to what the ECB, as early as June, has been saying the euro area economy would look like. I think incoming data, since our call for a bit more muted economic outlook, has been on the negative side. So for instance, we just today had the PMIs in contractionary territory. So the PMIs are the Purchasing Managers Indexes, which are soft indicators of economic activity. Soft because are survey evidence they're essentially questions ask industry participants about what they see on their side, and out of these questions an index is derived for economic activity. So all in all, the outlook is relatively muted, as I said, and I think a recession is clearly in the cards. 

Andrew Sheets: But Jens, why is growth in Europe so weak? When you think about things like that big decline in PMI that we just saw this week, what's driving that? What do you think is the key thing that maybe other forecasters might be missing in terms of driving this weakness? 

Jens Eisenschmidt: I mean, Europe is very, very close to one of the largest, geopolitical conflicts of our time. We have, as a consequence of that, to deal with very high energy prices. The dependance on Russian gas, for instance, is very high in several parts of Western Europe. But you're right, we have still accommodative monetary policy, so, all in all, we still have positive and negative factors, but we think that the negative factors are starting now to have the bigger weight in all this. And we have seen for the first time, as you just mentioned to PMI's in contractionary territory, while we are of course having a bit in the service sector, a different picture which is still driven from reopening dynamics coming out from COVID. So everybody wants to have a holiday after they didn't have one last year and the year before. 

Andrew Sheets: So I guess speaking of holidays, it involves a lot of driving, a lot of flying. I think that's a good segway into the energy story in Europe. This has been a really challenging dynamic because you've had obviously the risk of energy being cut off into Europe. When you think about modeling scenarios of less energy being available via Russia, how do you go about modeling that and what could the impact be? 

Jens Eisenschmidt: No, that's really the hard part here. Because, ultimately, if the energy is flowing and continues to flow, you can rely on data that goes back and that gives you some relationship between the price and then what the impact on economic activity on that price schedule will be. But if energy is falling to levels where governments have to decide duration, then the modeling becomes so much harder because you have to decide then in your model who gets gas or oil and at what price. That makes it very hard and it also explains why there's a huge range of model outcomes out there showing GDP impact for some economies as deep, in terms of contraction, of 10 to 15%. We are not in that camp. We think that even in a situation of a total cut off of, say, Russian gas, the euro area economy would contract, but not as deeply. Part of that is that we think that some time has elapsed since the threat has first become a possibility and the system has adjusted to some extent. And then what you get is a system that's a little bit more resilient now to a cut than it may have been in March. 

Andrew Sheets: Jens. I think that's also a good connection to the inflation story. So on one hand, inflation dynamics in Europe look quite similar to the U.S. On the other hand those inflation dynamics seem somewhat different from the U.S., core inflation is not as high, wage inflation is not as high. Could you kind of walk us through a bit of how you see that inflation story in Europe and how it's similar or different to what we see going on in the U.S.? 

Jens Eisenschmidt: There is clearly a difference here, and I think the ECB has never been tiring in stressing that difference that most of the inflation here in Europe is driven by external factors. And here, of course, energy is the big elephant in the room. It's not helped by the fact that we had a depreciation of the Euro against the U.S. dollar and most of the energy is, as we know, a built in U.S. dollar. We also have a significant food inflation, and of course, it's also linked very, very tightly to the conflict in Ukraine, where we have Ukraine as a big food exporter. Just think of oil, think of wheat, all these things that are in the headlines. So that's structurally different from a situation in the U.S. where you do have a significant part of the inflation being internal demand driven. And of course that leads to interconnection with a very tight labor market to a higher core inflation. Now core inflation in the euro area has also been picking up and it's certainly not at levels where the European Central Bank can be happy with. But, you know, all in all, both our set of assumptions and forecasts as well as the ECB's in the end boil down to a slight overshoot in the medium term of their inflation target. 

Andrew Sheets: So Jens, all of this brings us back to the main event, so to speak. The European Central Bank raised interest rates yesterday for the first time since 2011, and it was a pretty large increase. It was a half a percentage point increase. So what's driving the ECB thinking here and how is it trying to weigh all these different factors, in a world where rates are rising? 

Jens Eisenschmidt: So indeed, the ECB yesterday ended its negative rates policy, which was designed for a completely different environment, an environment of a persistent undershoot of its inflation target. By all available measures, they are now at target or above. So that in itself justifies ending this policy, and this is what they did yesterday. Now, of course, there is a concern that the high inflation that we see today is feeding into wage negotiations, is feeding into a process of more structurally higher inflation, and that risks the anchoring inflation expectations. So there is a need, even if you see the economy going weaker, there is a need to tighten its monetary policy. At the same time, they have this geopolitical conflict just very near to them. They have the risk to growth that we were talking about before. So that also means you cannot just now go out and line out a significant path of rate increases. So that leads to the second component of their decision yesterday. So they were say we will go meeting by meeting and we will be data dependent in our move. 

Andrew Sheets: So Jens, let's bring this back to markets. When you look at what markets are currently expecting from the ECB in terms of rate hikes out over the next, say, 18 months, do you think the ECB is likely to deliver more tightening than those rates imply or deliver rates that are lower than those current market expectations? 

Jens Eisenschmidt: So if you just talk about where markets see the ECB peaking, that's at 1.5%. We agree, just that we don't agree on the timing. So we, for instance, see the ECB going 50 basis points in September, but then slowing down to 25 in October and another 25 in December. And then we really see the ECB pausing until September next year. And the pause is introduced because the economy is weakening and significantly so, and we see this centered around the end of the year. Now in the markets, there is a bit of an assumption that the ECB will be more aggressive in terms of getting to the 1.5% earlier. Not necessarily still this year, but at some point early next year. 

Andrew Sheets: And just from the perspective of markets, you know, this is a reason why Morgan Stanley's foreign exchange team thinks that the euro will continue to weaken against the dollar. It's both a function of Jens your weak growth forecasts, but also potentially this idea that rates won't rise in Europe quite as fast as the market is expecting. Which would mean somewhat less support for the currency. 

Andrew Sheets: Jens, thanks for taking the time to talk. 

Jens Eisenschmidt: Thanks a lot, Andrew. It was a pleasure being with you. 

Andrew Sheets: As a reminder, if you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcasts app. It helps more people find the show. 

Original Release on July 1st, 2022: As inflation continues to be a major concern for the U.S., investors will want to pay attention to how spending, travel and sentiment are changing for consumers.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michelle Weaver, a U.S. equity strategist for Morgan Stanley Research. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be sharing the pulse of the U.S. consumer right now amid elevated inflation and concerns about recession. It's Thursday, July 7th, at 2 p.m. in New York. 

Consumer spending represents roughly 65% of total U.S. GDP. So if we're looking for a window into how U.S. companies could perform over the next 12 months, asking consumers how confident they're feeling is a great start. Are consumers planning on spending more next month or less? Are people making plans for outdoor activities and eating out or are they staying at home? Are they changing travel plans because of spending worries? 

These are a few of the questions that the equity strategy team asks in a survey we conduct with the AlphaWise Group, the proprietary survey and data arm of Morgan Stanley Research. We recently decided to change the frequency of our survey to biweekly to get a closer look at the consumer trends that will affect our outlook. So today, I'm going to share a few notable takeaways from our last survey, which was right before the July 4th holiday. 

First, let's take a look at sentiment. The survey found that inflation continues to be the top concern for two thirds of consumers, in line with two weeks before that, but significantly higher compared to the beginning of the year. Concern over the spread of COVID-19 continues to trend lower, with 25% of consumers listing it as their number one concern versus 32% last month. And 41% of consumers are worried about the political environment in the U.S. versus 38% two weeks ago, a slight tick up. Apart from inflation, low-income consumers are generally more worried about the inability to pay rent and other debts, while upper income consumers over index on concerns over investments, the political environment in the U.S., and geopolitical conflicts. 

A second takeaway to note is that consumer confidence in the economy continues to weaken, with only 23% of consumers expecting the economy to get better. That's the lowest percentage since the inception of our survey and down another 3% from two weeks ago. In addition, 59% of consumers now expect the economy to get worse. This lines up with the all-time lows observed in a recent consumer sentiment survey from the University of Michigan. 

A third takeaway is that consumers are planning to slow spending directly as a result of rising prices. 66% of consumers said they are planning to spend less over the next six months as a result of inflation. These numbers are influenced by income level, with lower income consumers planning to reduce spending more. We also asked consumers where they were planning to reduce spending in response to inflation. Dining out and take out, clothing and footwear, and leisure travel were among the most popular places to cut back, and all represent highly discretionary spending. 

And finally, the survey noted that travel intentions are considerably lower to the same time last year, with 55% of consumers planning to travel over the next six months, versus roughly 64% in the summer of last year. We also asked consumers if they were planning to cancel or delay post-Labor Day travel because of inflation. Generally, planned travel post-Labor Day is in line with broader travel intentions. Cruises and international travel were the most likely to be delayed or postponed. 

So what's the takeaway for investors? It is important to allocate selectively as consumer behavior shifts in order to cope with inflation and company earnings and margins come under pressure. Our team recommends defensive positioning, companies with high operational efficiency, and looking for idiosyncratic stories where companies have unique advantages. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.  

Interest in ESG investing has risen exponentially in recent years, leading to increased scrutiny around, and appreciation for, the hard data. Head of U.S. Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy Michael Zezas and Head of the ESG Fixed Income Research Team Carolyn Campbell discuss.

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Michael Zezas: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, head of U.S. Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy. 

Carolyn Campbell: And I'm Carolyn Campbell, head of the ESG fixed income research team at Morgan Stanley. 

Michael Zezas: And on this special edition of the podcast, we'll be assessing the next phase of the environmental, social, governance, ESG, market. It's Wednesday, July 20th, at 10 a.m. in New York. 

Michael Zezas: As some listeners may have read, in late May of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules that would require ESG funds to disclose their goals, criteria and strategies, along with data measuring ESG progress. And this tells us that although the market for ESG investing has grown, so has investor desire to see real data and empirical analysis on impact. And this could be seen as really the next phase of the ESG market, that companies and funds won't just claim to be focused on ESG but will provide real proof. So, Carolyn, just to set the stage, I notice that people sometimes use the term sustainable investing and ESG interchangeably. So, I think it might be good to start with what exactly ESG is. 

Carolyn Campbell: At its core ESG is about adding a new lens to risk management in our investment practices by looking at environmental, social and governance factors in addition to our traditional financial metrics and whatnot. ESG has been around in some way, shape or form for decades, beginning with what we call negative exclusions. Initially, that looked like excluding companies that conflicted with religious views such as gambling, alcohol or pornography. But it's probably best known more recently for what we would think of as the fossil fuel divestment movement; selling out of coal and oil and gas companies, for example. On the other end of the spectrum, we've got impact investing where money is put towards projects that are both worthy financial investments but are also meant to generate some type of positive impact, whether it be environmental or social. In between, ESG can look like a lot of things, whether that's selecting companies that are best in class or building a portfolio geared towards a certain theme like biodiversity, net zero or gender diversity. 

Michael Zezas: Now, you're a fixed income strategist and ESG investing through the bond market is a bit newer and still evolving. What are some of the challenges of investing in ESG through bonds as opposed to stocks? 

Carolyn Campbell: Well, so one big difference in fixed income is that there are products that are actually dedicated sustainability assets. Companies, governments and super nationals can issue bonds that are specifically ESG instruments, which isn't something that you can quite do in the stock market. The most common is the green bond. The net proceeds of the issuance go towards green projects, which can be things like retrofitting your buildings to be more energy efficient, building out a solar paneled roof, reducing water waste and so on. There are also social bonds with projects related to decreasing inequality or access to health care and sustainability bonds, which fund both types of projects. We spend a lot of time trying to understand how these instruments trade compared to normal vanilla bonds from the same issuer. A big driver of the difference in price and performance is that there are just a lot fewer of these label bonds and quite a large appetite to invest in them. So those supply and demand dynamics have historically helped these labor bonds trade well, particularly in the primary market. We recently completed some analysis, though, that found that when you strip away a lot of the structural differences, the premium afforded to these green bonds is pretty small over time, just around half a basis point. The big difference comes from green bonds that go the extra mile. These bonds have voluntary external verification, science-based targets, so on and so forth. Investors can see the green criteria of the bond and feel confident that the governance structures are in place to ensure the materiality of the green bond going forward. And these bonds on average trade with higher premiums to their vanilla counterparts than just your regular green bond. 

Michael Zezas: So I want to get into some of the challenges I mentioned at the start around the debate over ESG's impact and validity. What's been the catalyst for the increased scrutiny over what's often called 'greenwashing?' 

Carolyn Campbell: Yeah, great question. So if we take it back a step, ESG really took off during 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. And there was a surge of focus on, and enthusiasm around, ESG and climate change more broadly. The market's grown exponentially since then, and it was natural that some of these new products and developments would be met with a raised eyebrow. Protests and social unrest in 2020, for instance, marked a turning point for companies with society asking companies to state their values upfront and to start walking the walk. Much of the scrutiny around ESG is ensuring that companies are not taking advantage of ESG as a marketing exercise to generate goodwill and are, in a sense, putting their money where their mouth is. That's really accelerated this year with the war in Ukraine, which is highlighted that within ESG there are some potentially competing priorities, namely the social cost of high energy prices versus the far reaching implications of climate change, or the rising food insecurity versus a more sustainable value chain. Investors have begun to adopt more nuanced views of what ESG is and how it might evolve in a world with higher volatility and decades-high inflation prints. And not everybody has the same definition of what ESG means to them. At the end of the day, the debate centers around, is it affecting change, and if so, by how much? 

Michael Zezas: So I certainly understand the clamor for demonstrable proof of impact. But would you say that, even with incidents of greenwashing, has ESG moved the needle on achieving its goals? 

Carolyn Campbell: Another great question, and unfortunately, it's probably still too early to tell. ESG is really about playing the long game and moving the market's focus away from its bias towards short-termism. So the effects of these new cleaner investments might not necessarily be realized overnight. I think what is clear, though, is that the global greenhouse gas emissions haven't declined in recent years, despite this push towards more sustainable investing. In fact, 2021 marked the highest amount of global CO2 emissions ever recorded. That being said, while policy development at the federal level on climate might be facing some serious headwinds here in the US, there has been a positive push from the private sector to decarbonize, regardless of a legislative incentive. Just because we haven't seen a decline in emissions yet, doesn't mean it won't happen. It just means that there's a lot more work to do and a lot more money that needs to flow towards these sustainable solutions. 

Michael Zezas: So one of your key skills as a strategist is how you apply data and empirical analysis to ESG investments. Can you walk us through your work and your process? 

Carolyn Campbell: We start every report with a research question—how do you see factors, impacts, spread performance, for instance, or how much of a premium do these green bonds trade with? Sometimes these questions are commonly discussed and dissected in the news, in academic research and so on. But we try to begin each project with no presupposition of what we might find so that we don't bias our results. We want to let the data and results speak for itself. And we're not trying to push an agenda. We're trying to get to the bottom of complex problems that investors demonstrably care about. ESG data is incredibly tricky because it tends to have a shorter history than most financial metrics and is released slowly and often with lags. That doesn't give us a ton of wiggle room, but once we know the question we're trying to answer, we always start by collecting data, and we'll look for data from myriad sources: public and private, startups, the US government—you name it, we've looked into it. And then sadly, a lot of the work is data cleaning, as any data scientist listening knows all too well. Once we build the dataset, we start tackling that research question. Sometimes we're doing something a bit more simplistic, like standardizing metrics in order to facilitate a comparison of different instruments or companies. This is a big hurdle for ESG in particular, because we don't have anything like GAAP accounting metrics that every company has to report on. Just getting to a point where you can do an apples to apples comparison is not always straightforward. Often though, we look to use different types of regression models or other types of machine learning techniques to understand relationships in the market and to build the confidence in our results. Once we have those results, it's all about visualizing it in a compelling and clear way. 

Michael Zezas: If an investor is interested in the ESG space, what should they keep front of mind as they consider their investments? 

Carolyn Campbell: ESG is full of tradeoffs and it's rarely straightforward. We mentioned some of these dilemmas before, such as the social cost of the high gas prices and the implications of climate change by continuing to rely on fossil fuels. It's never clear cut. ESG isn't a one size fits all solution, and different investors are going to have different priorities. Understanding your priorities at the outset and keeping those as a guiding light will help keep the investment process on track and drown out some of the noise. That being said, it's also important in this fast evolving space to be flexible to new information and to be adaptable. The world looks very different now than it did a year ago or five years ago, and ESG in particular is rapidly changing with new regulations, new issues and new conflicts every day. Relying on the data and facts and understanding how trends change within the industry will be of utmost importance. 

Michael Zezas: Carolyn, thanks so much for talking. 

Carolyn Campbell: Great talking with you, Michael. 

Michael Zezas: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.

As U.S. Equities continue to face challenges this year, investors may want to look to a more positive story across the world—the reopening of China.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michelle Weaver, U.S. equity strategist for Morgan Stanley Research. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about China's reopening as COVID Zero policies evolve. It's Tuesday, July 19th, at 3 p.m. in New York. 

Recently, our China economics team has become more positive on the region due to the relaxation in domestic and international travel policies and signs of gradual reopening. The team believes that in order for China to shift away from COVID Zero, the three necessary conditions will be sufficiently high vaccination coverage, a broadening toolbox to preserve health care capacity and a change in public perception of COVID. 

Progress has been made on all of these conditions, and the team expects the economy to reopen more broadly in the back half of the year and that a COVID Zero exit could happen towards year-end. 

This is notable for global investors since the broad U.S. equity turmoil of the last few months makes it important to look for stocks whose stories are not levered to the market at large and are more thematic ideas. The potential reopening of a country with 1.4 billion residents hits both of these criteria. 

To dig into this, the US equity strategy team, headed by Chief Investment Officer Mike Wilson, and our European Equity Strategy Team, led by Graham Secker, sourced industries and names that could have high revenue exposure to China. We then asked sector analysts which stocks they thought stand to benefit the most from the reopening. 

In the US, the biggest beneficiaries were in the consumer discretionary, materials, industrials and information technology sectors. The names who stand to benefit here are American brands that have consumer appeal, benefit from out of home experiences or feature China as a key driver of revenue, where pent up demand could provide tailwinds. 

In Europe, the potential beneficiaries are companies that have the highest revenue exposure to China. But it's important to be selective here, as a relatively large number of industrial and commodity focused stocks could be exposed to wider concerns around a global economic slowdown. For that reason, companies who also have exposure to the Chinese consumer may be best positioned. 

Narrowing even further from a top-down perspective, we think the most direct beneficiary of a potential reopening narrative in China is the luxury goods sector, also known as consumer durables in MSCI terminology, which has the third highest China exposure of any European sector after semiconductors and materials. Relevant to the reopening angle specifically, the team believes the luxury sector has the highest exposure to the China consumer and is a beneficiary of reduced restrictions around travel. Given this exposure and the recent pullback in government bond yields, they have upgraded the sector to overweight from a top-down strategy perspective. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

Some investors think a potential recession is already priced in but given defensive leadership, labor statistics and incoming Fed rate hikes, it may be too early to tell.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, July 18th, at 11 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it.

Last week, we highlighted how extreme the 12-month price momentum weightings are for defensive sectors. In fact, it's unprecedented for this type of price momentum to occur outside of an economic recession. One reaction to this development we've heard from many clients is that a recession must already be priced based on this relationship. If true, then defensive leadership is likely to reverse with something else taking the lead, like growth stocks or even cyclicals. We disagree and believe defensive leadership will likely persist until either a recession is officially announced, or the risk of a recession is definitively extinguished.

In our view, the first outcome can only be achieved with a series of negative payroll data releases, something that still seems far away given last month's 372,000 new job additions. The second outcome—a soft landing—will also be hard to prove to the market until earnings revisions bottom out and companies stop doing hiring freezes.

With respect to the recession outcome, the odds have been steadily increasing now for months. Morgan Stanley's proprietary economic model is currently suggesting a 36% probability of a recession in the next 12 months. Historically speaking, once it reaches 40%, it's usually a definitive reading that recession is oncoming. Furthermore, jobless claims have been rising the past few weeks. Secondarily, the household survey for total employment peaked in March and has fallen by approximately 400,000 jobs so far. While not the gold standard for measuring labor market health, it's worth watching closely as things can change rapidly for hiring and firing, particularly when profits come under significant pressure, as we expect. Finally, the job openings data has started to roll over, albeit from record high levels, while consumer and business confidence readings remain at record lows.

In the very near term, equity markets seem to be digesting another hot Consumer Price Index release very well, even as concerns rose that the Fed might raise rates as much as 100 basis points next week. Our view is that 75 basis points is still the base case, and that should be plenty to keep the Fed on track to getting ahead of the curve. Importantly, the bond market seems to agree with the yield curve inverting the most since the 2000 cycle, quickly catching up to the defensive leadership of the stock market. The bullish take which this market seems to want to try and run with one more time, is that the Fed can pivot before a recession arrives.

The other positive that has investors excited again is the fact that bank stocks had a strong rally on Friday, even as the earnings results were quite mixed. While this kind of price action is a necessary condition for the bear market to be over, we would caution that second quarter results are likely to be the first of several cuts, not just for banks, but for the market overall.

The bottom line is that this earnings season is likely to be the first of several disappointing ones, especially if a recession is the endgame. Therefore, staying defensively oriented in one's equity positioning should remain the best course of action for the next several months.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcasts app. It helps more people to find the show.

This week brought yet another reading of inflation that exceeded expectations, but if markets and central banks are able to think long-term, there may be some hope on the horizon.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, chief cross-asset strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape, and how we put those ideas together. 

It's Friday, July 15th at 4:00pm in London.

One of the big stories this week was, once again, a high reading of US inflation that came in above economists’ expectations. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. US consumer price inflation was also higher than expected in June, May and April.

These upside surprises to inflation create a trio of problems. First, investors will feel more confident if inflation starts coming down, and this is yet another month where that isn’t the case. Second, the Fed has been adamant that it will keep raising interest rates until inflation moderates, which means that more rate hikes are likely coming. And third, this sets up a real predicament; the Fed wants to bring inflation down, and sees this as key to its credibility, but raising rates today won’t do much for inflation over the short-term. That creates additional uncertainty.

Markets are responding to that uncertainty by raising expectations of how much the Fed will increase rates in the near-term, while simultaneously becoming more worried about medium-term growth, and lowering expectation of rates over the long term. That has inverted the yield curve, something that, while rare, has historically signalled high odds of a recession.

What’s notable, however, is that while there is intense focus on the concerns and negative surprises from the current rate of inflation, the longer-term picture is arguably getting better. One can observe expected rates of inflation over the next 5, 10 or 30 years, also called inflation break-evens. Those expectations have been falling rapidly over the last 2 months.

In the US, markets currently see US Consumer Price Inflation to average about 2.35% over the next decade. That is more than half-a-percent lower than where that same estimate was just two months ago, and it’s similar to where these expectations were in March of 2021. 2.35% is also pretty close to the Fed’s inflation target; markets do not see inflation accelerating in an uncontrolled manner over the long term.

For investors, think of this dynamic as one of short-term pain but longer-term gains. Near-term high inflation, and uncertainty of when it will decline, could keep the Fed cautious and argues against buying the dip.

But looking further out, the market is giving encouraging signs that inflation is a manageable problem, and that central bank actions are working at addressing it. In the autumn, we could see a situation where the inflation data is moderating, while long-term inflation expectations confirm that that moderation continues. For markets, and for central banks, that would be much more helpful.

Thanks for listening! Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review! We’d love to hear from you.

Original Release on July 1st, 2022: For the last decade investors have been focused on highflying growth stocks, but this investing environment may be the exception rather than the rule. Chief European Equity Strategist Graham Secker and Global Head of Quantitative Investment Strategies Research Stephan Kessler discuss.

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Graham Secker: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Graham Secker, Morgan Stanley's Chief European Equity Strategist. 

Stephan Kessler: I am Stephan Kessler, Global Head of Quantitative Investment Strategies Research. 

Graham Secker: And on this special episode of the podcast, we'll be talking about the potential return of value investing post its decade long decline since the global financial crisis. It's Friday, July the 1st, at 10 a.m. in London. 

Graham Secker: As most listeners of this particular podcast are probably aware, for much of the past decade, investors have had something of a love affair with the highflying growth stocks in the market. Meanwhile, their value priced counterparts, the shares of which tend to trade at relatively low price to earnings multiples and or offering higher dividend yields, have had a considerably rougher time of it. But I believe that the last decade is more the exception to the rule rather than the norm. And I think your analysis, Stephan, shows that this is true, yes? 

Stephan Kessler: Yes, I agree. We have looked at the performance of value as an investment style back to the 1920s, and we find that the period between the end of the global financial crisis and the COVID pandemic was only the decade where value did underperform. For me, the why here is really an interesting question to pick apart, which you and I look at through two different lenses. You're the fundamental strategist and I'm the quantitative analyst. So I think my first question to you is, from your fundamental point of view, what were the main drivers of value’s underperformance during this lost decade? 

Graham Secker: Yes. So from our perspective, we think there were two main drivers of values underperformance post the GFC. Firstly, a backdrop of low growth, low inflation and low and falling and negative interest rates, created a particularly problematic macro backdrop for value stocks. The former two factors were weighing on the relative profitability of value stocks, while the very low interest rates were actually boosting the PE ratio of longer duration growth stocks. This unpalatable macro backdrop then coincided with a challenging micro backdrop as the broad theme of disruption took hold across markets. This prompted greater hope among investors for the long term growth potential of the disruptors, while undermining the case for mean reversion across other areas of the market whereby cyclical slowdowns were often effectively viewed as structural declines. So, Stephan, you've said that the discount on value stocks cannot be explained fully by fundamentals or justified by the earnings overview. What do you believe are the deeper drivers for this discount?  

Stephan Kessler: When you look at the value, it faced over the past few years, a range of challenges really. On the behavioral side, investors have focused on growth stocks and growth opportunities. This led to a substantial and persistent deviation of equities from their fair values and an underperformance of value investors. Next to this more behavioral argument, we find that the environmental, social and governance related aspects or in short, ESG and monetary policy were themes which drove price action. Equity value has a negative exposure to those themes. And finally, when you look at the 2020 period, there was a classical value trap situation. Companies which were most affected by the COVID pandemic sold off and appear cheap based on quite a range of value metrics, while the COVID catalyst continued to disrupt markets and led to companies which were cheaply valued not being able to recover as they had exposure to these disruptors. This only start to resolve in 2021, which is also when we start to see value regain performance. To get back to a more generalist view of the main drivers of values underperformance, I'd like to get back to you, Graham. You've observed a link between the macro and the micro, which created something of a vicious circle for value in the last cycle. Can you talk about how this situation looks going forward? 

Graham Secker: Yes, going forward, we think this vicious cycle for value could actually turn to be something more of a virtuous cycle over the next few years. We argue that we've entered a new environment of higher inflation and associated with that higher nominal growth, and that drives a recovery in the profitability of these older economy type companies. And at the same time, a rising cost of capital undermines the case for the disruptors. And that can happen both in terms of lower valuations off the back of higher interest rates, but also as liquidity starts to subside, a lack of capital to fund their future business growth. Stephan, you mentioned two of these key disruptive forces, quantitative easing by the central banks and then the rise of ESG. Can you talk about the impact of these two elements on the equity investment landscape? 

Stephan Kessler: ESG is a major theme in financial markets today, and in particular in this 2018-20 period we saw ESG positive names build up a premium, which made them appear expensive in the context of value metrics. These ESG valuation premia then turned out to be persistent and at times even grew. This then goes, of course, against value investors who try to benefit from this missed valuations mean reverting. And to the extent these valuations even turn stronger, that drove their losses. Quantitative easing is another aspect that drove price action. We find that value tends to underperform in time periods of low interest rates and does well in a rising rates environment. The economic driver behind this empirical observation is that the very low rates you saw in the past make proper valuations of firms difficult as discounted cash flow approaches are challenged. And so on the back of that, lower rates simply lead to valuation and value as signals being challenged and not properly priced. So given the historical narrative and all the forces at play during the past decade, what is your preference between value versus growth for the second half of 2022 and beyond that, Graham? 

Graham Secker: Yes. So in the short term, a backdrop of continued high inflation and rising interest rates should we think continue to favor value over growth. However, perhaps right towards the end of this year, we do envisage a situation where that could reverse a little bit, albeit temporarily, once inflation has peaked and the economic downturn has materialized, investor attention may start to focus on rates no longer rising, and that will put a little bit of a bid back under the growth stocks again. But I think if we look longer term, actually, I'm beginning to think that what we'll see is the whole value versus growth debate actually becomes a bit more balanced and hence I can see more range bound relative performance thereafter. And Stephan, from your perspective, in a world of rising bond yields and lower or normalized QE, what is your outlook for value going forward, too? 

Stephan Kessler: Well, when we look at the two catalysts for value underperformance, ESG and quantitative easing I mentioned earlier, we see that their grip on the market is loosening. For one, markets have moved into rates tightening cycle which means investors focus more on near-term cash flows rather than terminal value. This is a positive for value companies, which tend to well under such considerations. Furthermore, the dynamism of ESG themes has abated compared to the 18-20 period, leading to a lower effect on value. Another angle on this is also a look at the valuation of value as a style. It's quite cheap, so it's a good entry point. This leads to a positive outlook for value, but also for other styles. We like, particularly the combination of value and quality as it benefits from the attractive entry levels for value, as well as the defensiveness of an investment in quality shares. 

Graham Secker: So to summarize from a fundamental and quantitative approach, both Stephan and I think that the extreme underperformance of value that we've seen over the prior decade has ended, value looks well-placed to return to its traditional outperformance trends going forward. Stephan, thanks for taking the time to talk today. 

Stephan Kessler: Great speaking with you, Graham. 

Graham Secker: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today. 

After the recent Supreme Court ruling against the Environmental Protection Agency, Democrats appear poised to respond with a budget reconciliation plan that could impact health care, clean energy, and corporate taxes.

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Welcome to the Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Wednesday, July 13th, at 10 a.m. in New York. 

The Supreme Court just finished a busy session, and one of the judgments that investors should pay attention to was for the case, West Virginia vs the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. That judgment said the EPA had overreached on some regulations, embracing something called the Major Questions Doctrine, whereby the court suggested regulators should not be using prior legal authority to decide issues of major economic and political significance. Said more simply, the ruling suggests regulators need explicit authorization from Congress rather than just stretching current legal authorization. So the ruling basically punts many of the EPA's climate policies back to Congress for deliberation. 

And that matters for investors because it might be a motivating factor in the Democrats getting their budget reconciliation plan over the finish line. Without being able to rely on the EPA to enact climate policies, Democrats may be willing to compromise more within their own party to get done a package of tax increase funded initiatives on climate and health care. And recent news flow suggests Democrats continue to make progress in this direction. 

So let's break down what's reportedly in this package that investors should be aware of. There's a plan to let Medicare negotiate the prices it pays for certain prescription drugs. That's a fundamental challenge for the pharma sector. But as our pharma team has noted, it's not an existential one. And so the sector could still be an outperformer in a market that needs to further price in the potential for a recession, an environment where defensive sectors like pharma typically do well. 

Also reportedly in the plan is fresh spending on, and tax breaks for, clean energy technologies, a potential demand boost for the clean tech sector which our analysts remain quite constructive on.

But funding that plan is several tax adjustments, including a potential implementation of a corporate book tax, which you can think of as a corporate minimum tax. This could exacerbate corporate margin pressures from inflation in the economic growth slowdown. So while the sectors we just discussed could be outperformers, they would likely do so against the backdrop of a bear market for equities overall. With Congress in session ahead of its August recess, we expect to learn more in the next couple of weeks, and we'll, of course, keep you in the loop. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.

As Europe continues to curtail Russian gas imports, equity markets are preparing for further downturn in European economic growth, but there may be more risks yet to be priced in.

Important note regarding economic sanctions. This research references country/ies which are generally the subject of comprehensive or selective sanctions programs administered or enforced by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), the European Union and/or by other countries and multi-national bodies. Any references in this report to entities, debt or equity instruments, projects or persons that may be covered by such sanctions are strictly incidental to general coverage of the relevant Russian economic sector as germane to its overall financial outlook, and should not be read as recommending or advising as to any investment activities in relation to such entities, instruments or projects. Users of this report are solely responsible for ensuring that their investment activities in relation to any sanctioned country/ies are carried out in compliance with applicable sanctions.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Graham Secker, Head of Morgan Stanley's European Equity Strategy Team. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the two key issues that are dominating our current discussions with European equity clients, namely Russia gas supplies and the belated start to a new earnings downgrade cycle. It's Tuesday, July the 12th, at 2 p.m. in London. 

Over the last few months, we have been arguing that a curtailment of Russia gas imports represented the biggest risk to European equities and the main catalyst to push us down to our bear case scenario. While we are not yet ready to formally change our bull, base, or bear case index targets, recent news flow does suggest that risks remain skewed to the downside, and we note a further 17% downside from here to our bear case price target for MSCI Europe. 

Recent headlines about a reduction in Russia gas flows and the German government's move to level two of their emergency gas plan, has prompted our European economists to further lower their own GDP forecasts, and they now see a mild recession developing over the winter. However, with higher energy costs keeping inflation higher for longer, they make no changes to their European Central Bank forecasts and still expect European interest rates to move out of negative territory over the next few months. 

We have been expecting an EPS downgrade cycle to start in the third quarter, even before the recent rise in concerns around Russian gas supplies. While the realization of this risk event would likely drive a materially larger hit to profits, we note that European earnings revisions have already turned negative over the last couple of weeks, i.e. we are now seeing more analysts lowering EPS estimates than raising them. 

The sharp fall in equities over the last few months suggests that investors are already anticipating a sizable pullback in European profits. However, we do not think this means all of the bad news is already in the price. Rather, we note that a study of prior downturns suggests the stock markets tend to trough 2 to 3 weeks before earnings revisions bottom and that the minimum time duration between the start of a new downgrade cycle and this trough in earnings revisions is at least 3 months, but more often runs for over 6 months. In short, we are likely starting a 3 to 6 month earnings downgrade cycle and equities are unlikely to trough until we move towards the fourth quarter. 

Within the market, we expect the more defensive sectors to continue to outperform over the next couple of months, given their traditionally lower level of earnings volatility into a recession. The recent move lower in bond yields should also encourage some reinvestment into quality and growth stocks, and we have just raised luxury goods to overweight on this theme. In addition, the luxury sector should be a key beneficiary of the recent upturn in investor sentiment towards China. Luxury has a greater exposure to the China consumer than any other European sector. 

In contrast, we continue to recommend a more cautious stance on cyclicals, who don't traditionally start to outperform until the market itself troughs. Year to date, cyclical underperformance has been primarily driven by weakness in consumer facing stocks, reflecting the pressure on disposable income from high inflation. However, going forward, we expect to see greater underperformance from industrial cyclicals as weakness in end demand starts to move up the chain. These same companies are also likely to be the most adversely impacted by the disruption to Russia gas supplies, whether this be in terms of top line volumes, profit margins or both. For this reason, we are most cautious on stocks within the industrial, materials and autos sectors that also have a high degree of exposure to European end markets. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today. 

While stocks have recently rallied, the strength of the U.S. dollar has risen sharply over the past year, presenting a major potential headwind for equities in the coming earnings season.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, July 11th, at 11 a.m. in New York. 

One of the more popular views over the past decade has been the eventual decline of the U.S. dollar. After all, with the Fed printing so many dollars since the global financial crisis and then doubling down during the COVID pandemic, this idea has merit. However, after the great financial crisis, these printed dollars never made it into the real economy, as they were simply used to patch up broken balance sheets from the housing bust. Therefore, money supply never got out of hand. In fact, during the entire period after the Fed first embarked on quantitative easing in November 2008 through the end of the cycle in March of 2020, money supply growth averaged only 6%, right in line with the long term trend of money supply and nominal GDP growth. As a result, the U.S. dollar maintained its reserve currency status and actually rose 40% during that decade. 

However, as we pointed out back in April of 2020, the stimulus provided during COVID was very different. At the time, we suggested that the coordinated fiscal and monetary policy was unprecedented. The result is that money supply growth exploded and since February 2020 has averaged 17%, or three times a long term trend, a truly unprecedented outcome that left us with much more inflation than what was desired. Now, with the Fed reversing course so quickly and the checks having stopped long ago, money supply growth has fallen all the way back to its long term trend of just 6%. Given the projected path for rate hikes and quantitative tightening, money supply growth is likely to fall even further, and the dollar is unlikely to show any signs of decline until the Fed pivots. Such a pivot seems unlikely any time soon, especially after last week's strong jobs report. 

So why does this matter so much for stocks? Based on the extreme rally so far this year, the U.S. dollar is now up 16% year over year. This is about as extreme as it gets historically speaking and unfortunately it typically coincides with financial stress on markets, a recession or both. For stocks the stronger dollar is also going to be a major headwind to earnings for many large multinationals. This could not be coming at a worse time as companies are already struggling with margin pressure from cost inflation, higher or unwanted inventories and slower demand. The simple math on S&P 500 earnings from currency is that for every percentage point increase in the dollar on a year over year basis, it's approximately a 0.5 hit to earnings per share growth. Of course, things can change quickly, but it doesn't seem likely until the path of inflation slows enough to warrant a Fed pivot. 

The main point for equity investors is that this dollar strength is just another reason to think earnings revisions are coming down over the next few earnings seasons. Therefore, the recent rally is likely to fizzle out before too long. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcast app. It helps more people to find the show.  

As investors in the internet industry have begun to wonder if online dating platforms will sink or swim in the case of a recession, looking back on the last recession may shed some light on a potential shelter from the storm.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Lauren Schenk, Equity Analyst covering the small and mid-cap Internet Industry. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be giving some insight into consumer spending trends through the lens of online dating. It's Friday, July 8th, at noon in New York. 

How does online dating perform in a recession? 

Believe it or not, it's the number one question I've heard from investors over the last several weeks. And I think another way of getting at this question broadly, and you can really extrapolate this across many industries, is do consumers view a product as a necessary staple or as non-essential spending? 

On one hand amid elevated inflation on indispensable items like gas and groceries, you may think consumers would view online dating as a nonessential item. On the other hand, finding love or a significant other ranks usually pretty high in most people's life goals, so maybe it's a staple. 

So that's the question we sought to answer recently when we looked into how online dating platforms perform during a recession. To dig into this, we looked into some historical data from 2007-2010. What we found was that, for one online dating platform, subscriber growth was largely unaffected and actually accelerated slightly in 2008 and 2009. The net impact for this platform was a slight slowdown in organic revenue growth from low double digit growth in 2007, to mid-single digits in 2008 and 2009, and then accelerating to high teens by the end of 2010. 

So overall, we found that the continued need for human connection, and the low price of online dating, resulted in minimal business impact during the global financial crisis, despite a significant pullback in consumer spending. 

Looking at today, online dating has now become a more widely accepted service to a wider range of people. But how are things different from the last recession? Well, I'll share a few key differences from our research. 

First, online is now a primary way for couples to meet, with the percentage of U.S. relationships starting online increasing from 22% in 2009 to 39% in 2017, which makes it more of a staple than discretionary. 

Second, we believe there is greater pent up demand for the product today than in 2008 and 2009, given COVID. Which could better insulate online dating, since consumers may be less inclined to cut spending on services that were under consumed during the height of COVID. 

Third, the top brands have changed and are now predominantly mobile based versus desktop, and attract a younger user who typically have a lower income than 40 plus year olds. 

And finally, given the brand and geography shifts, a la carte revenue from things like profile boosting is a larger percentage of revenue today than during the global financial crisis, which may prove more discretionary than subscriptions. 

How does this impact our view of how online dating could perform in a potential recession? Given the 2008-2009 results and the differing macro factors of a potential 2023 recession we have increased confidence in our view that online dating is one of the best consumer internet sub industries to weather a potential recession storm. After all, people still need love and relationships in recession and you can argue they need it more. And the low average monthly cost means it's likely not an item that single consumers would cut first. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

As inflation continues to be a major concern for the U.S., investors will want to pay attention to how spending, travel and sentiment are changing for consumers.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michelle Weaver, a U.S. equity strategist for Morgan Stanley Research. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be sharing the pulse of the U.S. consumer right now amid elevated inflation and concerns about recession. It's Thursday, July 7th, at 2 p.m. in New York. 

Consumer spending represents roughly 65% of total U.S. GDP. So if we're looking for a window into how U.S. companies could perform over the next 12 months, asking consumers how confident they're feeling is a great start. Are consumers planning on spending more next month or less? Are people making plans for outdoor activities and eating out or are they staying at home? Are they changing travel plans because of spending worries? 

These are a few of the questions that the equity strategy team asks in a survey we conduct with the AlphaWise Group, the proprietary survey and data arm of Morgan Stanley Research. We recently decided to change the frequency of our survey to biweekly to get a closer look at the consumer trends that will affect our outlook. So today, I'm going to share a few notable takeaways from our last survey, which was right before the July 4th holiday. 

First, let's take a look at sentiment. The survey found that inflation continues to be the top concern for two thirds of consumers, in line with two weeks before that, but significantly higher compared to the beginning of the year. Concern over the spread of COVID-19 continues to trend lower, with 25% of consumers listing it as their number one concern versus 32% last month. And 41% of consumers are worried about the political environment in the U.S. versus 38% two weeks ago, a slight tick up. Apart from inflation, low-income consumers are generally more worried about the inability to pay rent and other debts, while upper income consumers over index on concerns over investments, the political environment in the U.S., and geopolitical conflicts. 

A second takeaway to note is that consumer confidence in the economy continues to weaken, with only 23% of consumers expecting the economy to get better. That's the lowest percentage since the inception of our survey and down another 3% from two weeks ago. In addition, 59% of consumers now expect the economy to get worse. This lines up with the all-time lows observed in a recent consumer sentiment survey from the University of Michigan. 

A third takeaway is that consumers are planning to slow spending directly as a result of rising prices. 66% of consumers said they are planning to spend less over the next six months as a result of inflation. These numbers are influenced by income level, with lower income consumers planning to reduce spending more. We also asked consumers where they were planning to reduce spending in response to inflation. Dining out and take out, clothing and footwear, and leisure travel were among the most popular places to cut back, and all represent highly discretionary spending. 

And finally, the survey noted that travel intentions are considerably lower to the same time last year, with 55% of consumers planning to travel over the next six months, versus roughly 64% in the summer of last year. We also asked consumers if they were planning to cancel or delay post-Labor Day travel because of inflation. Generally, planned travel post-Labor Day is in line with broader travel intentions. Cruises and international travel were the most likely to be delayed or postponed. 

So what's the takeaway for investors? It is important to allocate selectively as consumer behavior shifts in order to cope with inflation and company earnings and margins come under pressure. Our team recommends defensive positioning, companies with high operational efficiency, and looking for idiosyncratic stories where companies have unique advantages. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.  

As media reports indicate a possible tariff reduction on imports from China, some investors are wondering if this is signaling a return of modest trade barriers and unfettered investment between the U.S. and China.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Wednesday, July 6th, at 1 p.m. in New York. 

If media reports citing White House sources are to be believed, the U.S. is getting closer to reducing some tariffs on imports from China, motivated at least in part by trying to ease inflation pressures. This has prompted some investors to ask us if we think this is a signal that the U.S./China economic relationship is starting to head back toward what it was before 2018, where trade barriers between the two countries were modest, and U.S. corporate investment in China was largely unfettered. In short, we do not think this is the case and rather expect that the U.S. and China will continue on its current path of drawing up more barriers to commerce between them, particularly in the areas of new and emerging technologies. 

Let's break it down. Consider that the scope of the tariff reductions being reported is quite small. One report, citing a Biden administration official, suggested tariffs could be reduced on about $10 billion worth of goods, a sliver of the $370 billion of goods currently under tariff. Given that taking away all the tariffs would only result in shaving a few tenths of a percent off consumer price index growth, this modest change, though reportedly intended to curb inflation, is unlikely to be a meaningful inflation fighter. That suggests the U.S. continues to prioritize its long term competition goals with China over inflation concerns, which is not surprising given continued skepticism among U.S. voters of both parties over the role of China in the global economy. 

This leads to another important point, that tariff relief could counterintuitively accelerate U.S. policies that create commerce barriers with China. In line with our expectations, media reports suggest a tariff relief announcement could be paired with news of a fresh Section 301 investigation, which is the process to kick off a new round of tariffs that could be imposed on China. Again, this makes sense when accounting for the long term policy goals of the U.S., as well as the political considerations in a midterm election year. 

So bottom line, don't read too much into tariff relief if it's announced. The U.S. and China are likely to continue drawing up barriers, and accordingly rewiring the global economy as companies shift supply chains and end market strategies. This is 'slowbalization' in motion, and it will continue to drive challenges, such as margin pressure for U.S. multinationals, and opportunities, such as for key sectors like semiconductor capital equipment companies benefiting from a new wave of geopolitical CapEx. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show. 

Original Release on June 16th, 2022: While many investors may be curious to know what other investors are thinking and feeling about markets, there’s a lot more to the calculation of investor sentiment than one might think.

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Jay Bacow: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jay Bacow, Co-Head of U.S. Securitized Products Research here at Morgan Stanley. 

Jim Egan: And I'm Jim Egan, the other Co-Head of U.S. Securitized Products Research. 

Jay Bacow: And on this episode of the podcast, we'll be discussing the path for both housing prices, housing activity and agency mortgages through the end of the year. It's Thursday, June 16th, at noon in New York. 

Jay Bacow: Jim, it seems like every time we come on this podcast, there's another record in the housing market. And this time it's no different. 

Jim Egan: Absolutely not. Home prices just set a new record, 20.6% year over year growth. They set a new month over month growth record. Affordability, when you combine that growth in home prices with the increase we've seen in mortgage rates, we've deteriorated more in the past 12 months than any year that we have on record. And a lot of that growth can be attributed to the fact that inventory levels are at their lowest level on record. Consumer attitudes toward buying homes are worse than they've been since 1982. That's not a record, but you get my point. 

Jay Bacow: All right. So we're setting records for home prices. We're setting records for change in affordability. With all these broken records, investors are understandably a little worried that we might have another housing bubble. What do you think? 

Jim Egan: Look, given the run up in housing in the 2000s and the fact that we,ve reset the record for the pace of home price growth, investors can be permitted a little anxiety. We do not think there is a bubble forming in the U.S. housing market. There are a number of reasons for that, two things I would highlight. First, the pre GFC run up in home prices, that was fueled by lax lending standards that really elevated demand to what we think were unsustainable levels. And that ultimately led to an incredible increase in defaults, where borrowers with risky mortgages were not able to refinance and their only real option at that point was foreclosures. This time around, lending standards have remained at the tight end of historical ranges, while supply has languished at all time lows. And that demand supply mismatch is what's driving this increase in prices this time around. The second reason, we talked about affordability deteriorating more over the past 12 months than any year on record. That hit from affordability is just not as widely spread as it has been in prior mortgage markets, largely because most mortgages today are fixed rate. We're not talking about adjustable rate mortgages where current homeowners can see their payments reset higher. This time around a majority of borrowers have fixed rate mortgages with very affordable payments. And so they don't see that affordability pressure. What they're more likely to experience is being locked in at current rates, much less likely to list their home for sale and exacerbating that historically tight inventory environment that we just talked about. 

Jay Bacow: All right. So, you don't think we're going to have another housing bubble. Things aren't going to pop. So does that mean we're going to continue to set records? 

Jim Egan: I wouldn't say that we're going to continue to set records from here. I think that home prices and housing activity are going to go their separate ways. Home prices will still grow, they're just going to grow at a slower pace. Home sales is where we are really going to see decreases. Those affordability pressures that we've talked about have already made themselves manifest in existing home sales, in purchase applications, in new home sales, which have seen the biggest drops. Those kinds of decreases, we think those are going to continue. That lack of inventory, the lack of foreclosures from what we believe have been very robust underwriting standards, that keeps home prices growing, even if at a slower pace. That record level we just talked about? That was 20.6% year over year. We think that slows to 10% by December of this year, 3% by December of 2023. But we're not talking about home prices falling and we're not talking about a bubble popping. 

Jim Egan: But with that backdrop, Jay, you cover the agency mortgage backed securities markets, a large liquid way to invest in mortgages, how would you invest in this? 

Jay Bacow: So, buying a home is generally the single largest investment for individuals, but you can scale that up in the agency mortgage market. It's an $8.5 trillion market where the government has underwritten the credit risk and that agency paper provides a pretty attractive way to get exposure to the housing outlook that you've described. If housing activity is going to slow, there's less supply to the market. That's just good for investors. And the recent concern around the Fed running off their balance sheet, combined with high inflation, has meant that the spread that you get for owning these bonds looks really attractive. It's well over 100 basis points on the mortgages that are getting produced today versus treasuries. It hasn't been over 100 basis points for as long as it has since the financial crisis. Jim, just in the same way that you don't think we're having another housing bubble, we don't think mortgages are supposed to be priced for financial crisis levels. 

Jim Egan: Jay, thanks for taking the time to talk. 

Jay Bacow: Great speaking with you, Jim. 

Jim Egan: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

For the last decade investors have been focused on highflying growth stocks, but this investing environment may be the exception rather than the rule. Chief European Equity Strategist Graham Secker and Global Head of Quantitative Investment Strategies Research Stephan Kessler discuss.

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Graham Secker: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Graham Secker, Morgan Stanley's Chief European Equity Strategist. 

Stephan Kessler: I am Stephan Kessler, Global Head of Quantitative Investment Strategies Research. 

Graham Secker: And on this special episode of the podcast, we'll be talking about the potential return of value investing post its decade long decline since the global financial crisis. It's Friday, July the 1st, at 10 a.m. in London. 

Graham Secker: As most listeners of this particular podcast are probably aware, for much of the past decade, investors have had something of a love affair with the highflying growth stocks in the market. Meanwhile, their value priced counterparts, the shares of which tend to trade at relatively low price to earnings multiples and or offering higher dividend yields, have had a considerably rougher time of it. But I believe that the last decade is more the exception to the rule rather than the norm. And I think your analysis, Stephan, shows that this is true, yes? 

Stephan Kessler: Yes, I agree. We have looked at the performance of value as an investment style back to the 1920s, and we find that the period between the end of the global financial crisis and the COVID pandemic was only the decade where value did underperform. For me, the why here is really an interesting question to pick apart, which you and I look at through two different lenses. You're the fundamental strategist and I'm the quantitative analyst. So I think my first question to you is, from your fundamental point of view, what were the main drivers of value’s underperformance during this lost decade? 

Graham Secker: Yes. So from our perspective, we think there were two main drivers of values underperformance post the GFC. Firstly, a backdrop of low growth, low inflation and low and falling and negative interest rates, created a particularly problematic macro backdrop for value stocks. The former two factors were weighing on the relative profitability of value stocks, while the very low interest rates were actually boosting the PE ratio of longer duration growth stocks. This unpalatable macro backdrop then coincided with a challenging micro backdrop as the broad theme of disruption took hold across markets. This prompted greater hope among investors for the long term growth potential of the disruptors, while undermining the case for mean reversion across other areas of the market whereby cyclical slowdowns were often effectively viewed as structural declines. So, Stephan, you've said that the discount on value stocks cannot be explained fully by fundamentals or justified by the earnings overview. What do you believe are the deeper drivers for this discount?  

Stephan Kessler: When you look at the value, it faced over the past few years, a range of challenges really. On the behavioral side, investors have focused on growth stocks and growth opportunities. This led to a substantial and persistent deviation of equities from their fair values and an underperformance of value investors. Next to this more behavioral argument, we find that the environmental, social and governance related aspects or in short, ESG and monetary policy were themes which drove price action. Equity value has a negative exposure to those themes. And finally, when you look at the 2020 period, there was a classical value trap situation. Companies which were most affected by the COVID pandemic sold off and appear cheap based on quite a range of value metrics, while the COVID catalyst continued to disrupt markets and led to companies which were cheaply valued not being able to recover as they had exposure to these disruptors. This only start to resolve in 2021, which is also when we start to see value regain performance. To get back to a more generalist view of the main drivers of values underperformance, I'd like to get back to you, Graham. You've observed a link between the macro and the micro, which created something of a vicious circle for value in the last cycle. Can you talk about how this situation looks going forward? 

Graham Secker: Yes, going forward, we think this vicious cycle for value could actually turn to be something more of a virtuous cycle over the next few years. We argue that we've entered a new environment of higher inflation and associated with that higher nominal growth, and that drives a recovery in the profitability of these older economy type companies. And at the same time, a rising cost of capital undermines the case for the disruptors. And that can happen both in terms of lower valuations off the back of higher interest rates, but also as liquidity starts to subside, a lack of capital to fund their future business growth. Stephan, you mentioned two of these key disruptive forces, quantitative easing by the central banks and then the rise of ESG. Can you talk about the impact of these two elements on the equity investment landscape? 

Stephan Kessler: ESG is a major theme in financial markets today, and in particular in this 2018-20 period we saw ESG positive names build up a premium, which made them appear expensive in the context of value metrics. These ESG valuation premia then turned out to be persistent and at times even grew. This then goes, of course, against value investors who try to benefit from this missed valuations mean reverting. And to the extent these valuations even turn stronger, that drove their losses. Quantitative easing is another aspect that drove price action. We find that value tends to underperform in time periods of low interest rates and does well in a rising rates environment. The economic driver behind this empirical observation is that the very low rates you saw in the past make proper valuations of firms difficult as discounted cash flow approaches are challenged. And so on the back of that, lower rates simply lead to valuation and value as signals being challenged and not properly priced. So given the historical narrative and all the forces at play during the past decade, what is your preference between value versus growth for the second half of 2022 and beyond that, Graham? 

Graham Secker: Yes. So in the short term, a backdrop of continued high inflation and rising interest rates should we think continue to favor value over growth. However, perhaps right towards the end of this year, we do envisage a situation where that could reverse a little bit, albeit temporarily, once inflation has peaked and the economic downturn has materialized, investor attention may start to focus on rates no longer rising, and that will put a little bit of a bid back under the growth stocks again. But I think if we look longer term, actually, I'm beginning to think that what we'll see is the whole value versus growth debate actually becomes a bit more balanced and hence I can see more range bound relative performance thereafter. And Stephan, from your perspective, in a world of rising bond yields and lower or normalized QE, what is your outlook for value going forward, too? 

Stephan Kessler: Well, when we look at the two catalysts for value underperformance, ESG and quantitative easing I mentioned earlier, we see that their grip on the market is loosening. For one, markets have moved into rates tightening cycle which means investors focus more on near-term cash flows rather than terminal value. This is a positive for value companies, which tend to well under such considerations. Furthermore, the dynamism of ESG themes has abated compared to the 18-20 period, leading to a lower effect on value. Another angle on this is also a look at the valuation of value as a style. It's quite cheap, so it's a good entry point. This leads to a positive outlook for value, but also for other styles. We like, particularly the combination of value and quality as it benefits from the attractive entry levels for value, as well as the defensiveness of an investment in quality shares. 

Graham Secker: So to summarize from a fundamental and quantitative approach, both Stephan and I think that the extreme underperformance of value that we've seen over the prior decade has ended, value looks well-placed to return to its traditional outperformance  trends going forward. Stephan, thanks for taking the time to talk today. 

Stephan Kessler: Great speaking with you, Graham. 

Graham Secker: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today. 

As the risks to international economic growth increase, global investors may find some good news in the Japanese equities market. 

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jonathan Garner, Morgan Stanley's Chief Asia and Emerging Markets Equity Strategist. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, today I'll be reflecting on a recent visit to Japan. It's Thursday, June the 30th, at 1 p.m. in London. 

I spent two weeks in Tokyo meeting with a wide range of market participants and others. This trip came together as Japan opened up to business visitors and small groups of tourists, after a lengthy period of COVID related travel restrictions. Japan equities - currency hedged for the U.S. dollar based investor - are our top pick in global equities and have been doing well this year relative to other markets. 

My first impression was how cheap prices in Japan now are at the current exchange rate of ¥135 to the U.S. dollar. For example, a simple metro journey in the inner core of Tokyo is priced at ¥140, so almost exactly $1 USD currently. It's possible to get a delicious lunchtime meal of teriyaki salmon, rice, pickles, miso soup and a soft drink in one of the numerous small cafes under the giant urban skyscrapers of the Central District of Marinucci for ¥1,000 or even lower. So that's about $6 to $7 USD currently. 

We feel this competitive exchange rate bodes well for the major Japanese industrial, technology and pharmaceutical firms, which dominate the Japan equity market as they compete globally. Indeed, the currency at these levels is one of the reasons that earnings revisions estimates, by bottom up analysts covering these companies, continue to move higher. Unlike the overall situation in global equities currently. 

In meetings, I was often asked whether we shared some of the concerns which have been voiced by some commentators on the Bank of Japan's monetary policy stance. The Monetary Policy Committee meeting for June was held during my trip, and the Bank of Japan kept its short term policy rate at -0.1% and also reiterated its pledge to guide the ten year government bond yield at +/- 25 basis points around a target of zero. Clearly, this monetary policy is divergent with trends elsewhere in the world currently and in particularly with the U.S. And this divergence is a key reason why the yen has been weakening this year. 

We at Morgan Stanley feel strongly that this approach is the right one for Japan, for one key reason. Unlike the U.S., UK or other advanced economies, Japan's inflation rate remains in line with policy goals. Headline CPI inflation is running at just 2.5% year on year, while CPI ex food and energy is 0.8%. Japan does not have a breakout to the upside in wage inflation either. We also think BOJ Governor Kuroda-san was correct in identifying downside risks to international economic growth as a risk factor for Japan's own GDP growth going forward, which at the moment we think is likely to track at around 2% this year. 

During our trip, we also spent time with investors discussing Japan Prime Minister Kishida-san's modifications to the policies of his two predecessors, in particular around a more redistributive approach to fiscal policy and digitalization of the public sector. The trend to greater corporate engagement with minority investors and activist investors was also debated. Japan is now the second largest market globally after the US for activist investor campaigns to promote corporate restructuring, thereby unlocking shareholder value. 

For us. Ultimately, the proof of the pudding, and how the Japan story all comes together, is the trend in corporate return on equity for listed equities. This has risen from less than 5% on average in the 20 years prior to Abe-san's premiership to above 10% currently. And it's now converged with two key North Asian peers; China and Korea. With Japan equities trading at the low end of the valuation range for the last 10 years, below 12 x forward price to earnings multiple, we think it's a market which deserves more attention from global investors. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

As legislators try to manage the U.S. and China’s economic relationship, outbound investors will want to keep tabs on potential policy coming down the pipeline.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Wednesday, June 29th, at 10 a.m. in New York. 

Washington, D.C., continues to focus on two areas of bipartisan concern: fighting inflation and managing the economic relationship with China. To that end, deliberations continue on legislation intended to reduce reliance on China supply chains for semiconductors and rare earth materials, as well as invest in research and development for emerging technologies. The Senate and House have both passed versions of this legislation, respectively called the USICA and the COMPETES Act. Now there's a conference committee deciding what's in the final bill. And here's where investors need to pay attention, because there continues to be news that this committee could end up including a provision that would limit U.S. companies ability to make business investments in, quote, unquote, countries of concern. If they do, it could create downside pressure for markets in China in the near term, and would underscore the secular trend we continue to focus on: "slowbalization", which creates both equity sector challenges and opportunities. 

Consider that these outbound investment restrictions would mirror ones already in place for inbound investments through CFIUS. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. In short, it could make it difficult for companies to, say, build a factory in China if the product or production process includes technology that the U.S. deems critical to its economic or national security. Some independent estimates suggest this could reduce foreign direct investment in China by as much as 40%. 

This is classic slowbalization in motion, where policy choices are cutting against the cost benefits of globalization, driven by security concerns as we move toward a multipolar world; one with more than one political economy power base. And the level of disruption from this particular provision could create downward pressure on equity markets in China. It could also underscore current headwinds to U.S. markets, suggesting that many U.S. companies' margins will be pressured as they spend more in the future to diversify supply chains away from China. Of course, in line with our thesis of slowbalization, there's opportunity too. The CapEx needed to build these new supply chains has to go somewhere, and for example, semiconductor capital equipment companies could see a major up shift in demand. 

So investors need to stay tuned to the deliberations on outbound investment restrictions. It's far from a done deal, to be clear, but a major policy development if it happens. While there's no timeline for when we will know if this provision is included, we recommend paying attention to the Biden administration's deliberations on China tariffs. If the administration decides to provide even just targeted and temporary tariff reductions, in an attempt to ease inflation pressures over the next couple of months, it might also feel compelled to, at the same time, announce new measures to demonstrate its continued seriousness about competing with China. An announcement of a legislative agreement on outbound investment restrictions could be one way to do this. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.

As the Fed continues with aggressive policy tightening, fixed income investors may be wondering if the bond market is accurately priced and when we might see it rally. Chief Cross-Asset Strategist Andrew Sheets and Director of Fixed Income Research Vishy Tirupattur discuss.

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Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley Research. 

Vishy Tirupattur: And I'm Vishy Tirupattur, Director of Fixed Income Research at Morgan Stanley. 

Andrew Sheets: And today on the podcast, we'll be discussing the outlook for the U.S. bond markets. It's Tuesday, June 28th, at 9 a.m. in San Francisco. 

Andrew Sheets: A note to our listeners, Vishy and I are recording this while we're on the road talking to clients, so if the audio quality sounds a little bit different, we hope you'll bear with us. 

Andrew Sheets: So Vishy, this has been a historically volatile start to the year for U.S. fixed income. We've seen some of the largest bond market losses in 40 years. Before we get into our views going forward, maybe just give a little bit of perspective about how you see this year so far, and what's been driving the market. 

Vishy Tirupattur: Andrew, what's been driving the market is the significant and substantial change in the monetary policy expectations, not only in the U.S. but also across most developed market economies. That means we started the year with the target Fed funds rate around close to 0%, and we have now ratcheted up quite significantly. And markets are already pricing in a further substantial increase in the Fed funds rate going forward. All this has meant that the duration sensitive parts of the bond market have taken it on the chin. 

Andrew Sheets: So Vishy that's interesting because we might be seeing kind of a transition in the market narrative as we head in the second half. What do you think the bond market, especially the Treasury market, is currently pricing in terms of Fed expectations? And do you think the bond market is priced for a recession? 

Vishy Tirupattur: I think bond market is sending some signals here. So the bond market is pricing that the Fed will continue to combat high inflation by being aggressively frontloaded in interest rate hikes. So this frontloading of the interest rate hikes means the front end of the Treasury curve perhaps has some more to go. And we expect that the end of the year, the two year Treasury will be at 4%. But on the other hand, the ten year Treasury, we expect the year at 350. That means the market is already beginning to become concerned about how growth and growth prospects for the U.S. economy will work out in the next 6 to 12 months. So by all measures we can look at the probability of a recession have significantly increased. That is what is being priced in the market at this point. 

Andrew Sheets: You know, I think it's safe to say that the dominant story, right, to start the year has been these upside surprises to inflation and then central banks, including the Fed, racing to catch up to those upside inflation surprises. And yet it's really interesting the way that Chair Powell and the Fed are now describing the way they're going to react to inflation is to say that we will effectively keep tightening policy as long as inflation surprises to the upside. But isn't the Fed using a tool that works with a lag?

Vishy Tirupattur: That is absolutely correct Andrew. What the withdrawal of policy accommodation that the Fed is accomplishing through these frontloaded hikes is tightening of financial conditions. We have begun to see some effect of this tightening of financial conditions on the economic growth already. But in reality, the long experience suggest that these effects will be lagged anywhere between 6 to 18 months. So this is what our economists are thinking, given this frontloaded hiking path. We think the Fed will stop hiking towards the end of this year in December, and we will watch for how these tighter financial conditions will restrain aggregate demand and slow the growth or slow the U.S. economy over the course of the next 6, 12, 18 months. 

Andrew Sheets: So Vishy, I'd like to move next into what all this means for our fixed income recommendations and to run through the major sectors of that market. So let's start with Treasuries. What do you see as our key views in the Treasury market? And where do you think we might differ the most from what's currently in market pricing? 

Vishy Tirupattur: I think we are still neutral in taking duration risk at this point. I expect that in the not so distant future we would become constructive on taking interest rate risk to the Treasury market. So our expectation is that a year from now, so second quarter of next year, ten year Treasury will be at three or five. 

Andrew Sheets: And Vishy, you know, we're in this environment where inflation is high and usually high inflation is bad for bonds. But growth is slowing, which is good for bonds. So, you know, given that push and pull, how do we think treasuries come out of that? 

Vishy Tirupattur: I think Treasuries will come out pretty well out of this. Why I say that is that the bulk of the pain from aggressive monetary policy has already been felt and taken in the market. So going forward, our expectation is not for incrementally more aggressive policy pops to be priced, but actually something that is more or less in line with already what is priced in the market. 

Andrew Sheets: Vishy, the next market I want to ask you about is the mortgage market. This is another huge part of the aggregate bond index. How do we think mortgages perform? Do we think they perform better or worse than the Treasury segment? 

Vishy Tirupattur: So the mortgage market is interesting. We started the year with the the generic mortgage rate around 3%. It had gone up almost to 6%, more or less doubled over the course of the last six months or so. So embedded in the mortgage market is a mortgage spread, but around 130 basis points of nominal mortgage spread is nearly at an all time high. And we think that that means a lot of this expectation coming out of higher rates, a slowing of the housing market, is already well priced into the mortgage market. So my expectation is that going forward, the mortgage market, will outperform the treasury market over the course of the next 6 to 12 months. 

Andrew Sheets: And Vishy, you know we talked about treasuries and we talked about mortgages and I probably can't ask you about those markets without also asking about quantitative tightening. The fact that the Fed has been big buyers, both Treasuries and mortgage bonds, and the Fed is going to stop doing that and is going to let its holdings of those securities roll off. So how important is that to the outlook for these markets? And is that quantitative tightening already in the price? 

Vishy Tirupattur: So two things on this. There is something called a stock effect and the flow effect. We think the stock effect component of the quantitative tightening, both in the context of treasuries and in the context of NBS, is mostly priced in. The flow effect will begin to manifest itself as the quantitative tightening actually begins to happen and we see this portfolio rebalancing channel to actually materialize. All that means is that the portfolio managers that had been underweight mortgages and overweight credit. We think that will change in favor of mortgages going from underweight towards neutral and credit going from overweight towards neutral. 

Andrew Sheets: So the last market I want to ask you about was the credit market, which is, I think, especially relevant given we've seen more market discussion of the risk to growth, the probability of a recession, the potential that defaults usually pick up during periods of weak economic growth. How do you see the outlook for corporate bonds fitting into this picture? 

Vishy Tirupattur: So if you look at the corporate bond market, the good thing here is that compared to other points at the beginning of a rate hiking cycle, the fundamentals of corporate bond market are in really good shape. You can see that in terms of leverage, interest coverage, as well as cash and balance sheet metrics. So that's a good thing. The second thing is that the financing needs of many of these companies is not as imposing as would otherwise being the case. Take the high yield market, high yield market and the leveraged loan market together about 3 trillion outstanding market. Only 10% of this is due for refinancing over the course of this year, 2022, 2023 and 2024. That means the world of maturities being an imposing challenge for the credit markets is that much, well, manageable. But that said, there's one segment of the market that is more vulnerable to hiking to higher interest rates, and that is the leveraged loan market, which is a floating rate funding market. So we expect that this market will see its cost of financing increase as interest rates start to get ratcheted up. But the one point I want to make here is that in terms of expectations of default rates, we won't see a dramatic spike in default rates the way we have seen in the past recessions. So compared to 2008-2009 recession, the post-COVID recession, early 2000's recession, in all of those instances when we had an economic slowdown and a recession, we saw a spike in corporate default rates. Because of the starting point of fundamentally is so much better this time, our expectation is that we will not see dramatic spikes in default rates in the credit market.

Andrew Sheets: Vishy, thanks for taking the time to talk. 

Vishy Tirupattur: Always a pleasure to talk to you, Andrew. 

Andrew Sheets: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcast app. It helps more people find the show. 

Talk of recession continues among investors and consumers alike, but last week saw a sharp rally in U.S. Equities. Is this just a blip or could U.S. equity markets rally further?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, June 27th, at 2 p.m. in New York. So let's get after it.

With talk of recession increasing sharply over the past few weeks, equity markets decided enough bad news had been priced and rallied sharply. Furthermore, the decline in both oil and interest rates helped ease some of the concerns on inflation. In our view, both the fall in oil and rates are being driven more by fears of an economic slowdown rather than a real peak in inflation and will lead to a more dovish Fed. However, with markets so oversold and bearishness pervasive, equity investors have taken the bullish view and rerated stocks higher.

Based on Friday's close, the S&P 500 is trading back at 16.3 times, or one turn higher than where it was at the prior week's lows. This seems unusual given the growing concern about earnings, however. In fact, even taking into account the fall in 10-year yields, the equity risk premium is back below 300 basis points. In our view, that makes little sense in the context of the likely negative earnings revisions coming in the second quarter reporting season and the rising risk of recession over the next 6 to 12 months.

Perhaps the best way to explain last week's rally has to do with the short-term rolling correlation between equities and real yields, which is now deeply negative again. This means the recent decline in bond yields has been perceived as positive for equities, something we think will prove to be incorrect if the falling yields are signaling slower growth or recession. For falling yields to be positive for equities at this stage, we would need to see cresting inflation pressures, a less hawkish Fed policy path, more durable economic growth than we expect, and a reacceleration in earnings revisions.

In addition to this combination of factors, which suggests a soft landing for the economy, we would also need to see limited negative revisions to earnings. Thus, we see the recent rebound in equities as another bear market rally on the path to fair value price levels of 3400-3500 in the case a soft landing is achieved with modest earnings revisions. However, as noted last week, a recession would bring tactical price lows closer to 3000 as earnings decline by at least 20% before working back to our June 2023 bear case target of 3350. In short, the bear market is likely not over, although it may feel like it over the next few weeks. Markets are likely to take the lower rates as a sign the Fed can orchestrate a soft landing and prevent a meaningful revision to earnings forecasts.

In that context, we think U.S. equity markets can rally further. In addition to lower rates and oil prices helping support the belief in a soft landing there is some equity demand from pension funds that need to rebalance at the end of the month and quarter this week. If retail investors join in like last week, that could carry equity prices higher before second quarter earnings season begins and the revisions arrive. Finally, a retracement of 38-50% of the entire decline would not be unnatural or out of line with prior bear market rallies, even ones associated with a recession at the end. In S&P 500 terms, that would translate into 4100-4200 or approximately 5-7% upside from Friday's close. Furthermore, if such a rally were to continue, it would likely be led by the longer duration or interest rate sensitive stocks like technology, or the Nasdaq.

However, we want to be clear that in no way are we suggesting the bear market is over or that earnings estimates won't have to come down. Instead, we are simply being realistic about the nature of bear markets and their ability to confound all market participants at times, even the bears. We suggest using equity market strength over the next few weeks to lighten up further on portfolios.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcasts app. It helps more people to find the show.

Original Release on June 9th, 2022: While many investors may be curious to know what other investors are thinking and feeling about markets, there’s a lot more to the calculation of investor sentiment than one might think.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape and how we put those ideas together. It's Thursday, June 9th, at 6 p.m. in London. 

I've found that investors are almost always interested in what other types of investors are doing. Some of this is curiosity, but a lot of it is interest in sentiment and a desire to try to quantify market emotion to give a better indicator of when to buy or sell. 

One can find a variety of metrics that portend to reflect this investor mood. Many of them move in nice, big, oscillating waves between fear and greed. But as anyone trying to use them as encountered, investing based on sentiment is harder in theory than practice. 

The first challenge, of course, is that there is little agreement in professional circles on exactly the best way to capture market emotion. Is it different responses to a regular investor survey? Is it the level of implied volatility in the market? Is it the flow of money in and out of different funds? The potential list goes on. 

Next, once you have an indicator, what's the right threshold to establish if it's telling you something is extreme? If you poll a thousand investors every week, maybe 70% of those investors being negative tells you the mood is sufficiently sour. But maybe the magic number is 80%, or maybe it's 60%. Defining positive or negative sentiment isn't always straightforward. 

Finally, there's the simple but important point that sometimes the crowd is right. Think of a long bull market like the 1990s. People were often optimistic about the stock market and correct to think so as prices kept rising. Meanwhile, people are often bearish in a bear market. We remember the dour mood that persisted throughout 2008. It certainly didn't stop stocks from going down. 

With all of this in mind, our research is focused on finding some ways to use sentiment measures more effectively. 

We think it makes sense to use a composite of different indicators, as true extremes are likely to show up across multiple approaches to measurement. Valuing both the level and direction of sentiment can be helpful. Rather than trying to catch an absolute extreme or market bottom, the best risk reward is often when sentiment is negative but improving. And sentiment is more useful to identify market lows than market peaks, as negativity and despair tend to be stronger, sharper emotions. Identifying peak optimism, at least in our work, is much harder. So don't beat yourself up if you can't find a signal that consistently flags market tops. 

Those ideas underlie the tools that we've built to try to turn market sentiment into signals as the age old debate around the true state of fear and greed continues throughout this year. 

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you. 

Inflation has continued to surprise to the upside, causing global central banks to face a difficult choice; continue to raise rates at the risk of recession, or settle in for a long spell of elevated inflation.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Chief Global Economist. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives. Today, I'll be talking about the key challenges for central banks and particularly the European Central Bank. It's Thursday, June 23rd, at 3:30 p.m. in New York. 

Just about all conversations these days involve high inflation and monetary policy tightening. It is tough all over. Central banks all have to make harder and harder choices as inflation keeps surprising to the upside. Take the Fed. They hiked 75 basis points at their last meeting. That was 25 basis points more than was priced in just a week before the meeting. 

At the June European Central Bank meeting, President Lagarde also weighed in. She was clear about a 25 basis point hike in July and that the rate hike in September would be larger, presumably 50 basis points if the outlook for medium term inflation is still above target. Putting that simply, if the ECB does not lower its forecast for inflation in 2024, we should expect a 50 basis point hike in September. 

A lower inflation forecast faces long odds. Headline inflation in Europe will be pushed around by commodity prices. Consider that European inflation is much more non-core, that is food and energy, than it is core inflation. And for core inflation, the ECB typically looks to economic growth as the key driver, but with about a one year lag. So their forecast for 2024 inflation is going to depend on their forecast for 2023 growth. And it's just very hard to see what data we are going to get by September that's going to meaningfully lower their forecast for 2023 growth. So now the ECB has joined the ranks of central banks that are hiking more and more with the goal of slowing inflation. But they have to face the dilemma that I wrote a few pieces about back in January. 

At that point, I was discussing the Fed, but the same choice is there and it is stark— either cause a recession and bring inflation down in the near term or engineer a substantial slowdown, but one that is shy of a recession, and accept elevated inflation for years to come. You see, despite the typical lags of policy, if the ECB chose to engineer a recession right now, those effects would almost surely show through to growth by 2023, pulling down inflation in 2024. 

So why are they making this choice? On the most simple level, no central banker really wants to cause a recession if they can avoid it. And remember that euro area inflation is now heavily driven by food and energy prices. Those noncore prices are only barely related to Euro area activity. It would take a severe recession in Europe to meaningfully drive down noncore prices. And finally, reports are swirling of a new tool to ward off fragmentation in European markets. If we get a hard crash of the economy, that by itself could precipitate the market fragmentation that they're trying to avoid. 

So what happens next? The Governing Council is on a hiking cycle, but they want a soft landing. The problem is that we are more pessimistic than they are about Euro Area growth starting as soon as the second half of this year. With inflation currently high and their commitment to tightening to fight that inflation, we might not get the clear signals of a slowdown in the economy before it's too late. 

The ECB might think it is choosing the more benign path but if our forecasts are right, the risks of them hiking into a recession, even inadvertently, are clearly rising. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy this show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today. 

As inflation remains top of mind from Wall Street to the White House, policy makers continue to propose possible actions to fight inflation, but will these proposals ever be enacted?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Wednesday, June 22nd, at 10 a.m. in New York. 

Main Street and Wall Street agree that inflation is a problem. And of course, Washington, DC continues to take notice. The White House and Democratic leadership continues to press publicly that they're taking inflation seriously and pursuing a variety of options to slow rising prices in the economy. This includes today's news that the White House is endorsing a plan for a gas tax holiday, which would need congressional approval. Not surprisingly, then, investors have been asking us a lot lately about policy options that have been floated in news headlines as possible inflation fighters. In short, we think many proposals will remain simply that, proposals, keeping pressure on the Fed to be the inflation fighter. 

Why won't most proposals be enacted? Simply put, most options on the table can't get enough votes in Congress to be enacted due to political concerns, effectiveness concerns, and sometimes both. Take the gas tax holiday proposal. Key Republican senators have already voiced opposition to the move, as have moderates in the Democratic caucus, on concerns that the holiday would have only a limited impact on prices at the pump, while steering money away from infrastructure maintenance. 

Accordingly, you might see the administration take some actions on its own. For example, there have been many headlines about the White House considering easing tariffs on imports from China. But in our view, any tariff reduction is likely to be temporary and small in scope, focusing on a subset of consumer goods rather than blanket tariff reductions, as administration is likely reticent to do too much on tariff reduction without a reciprocal concession from China. Given that independent economists estimate that a blanket tariff removal would only reduce inflation by a few tenths of a percent, this smaller scale action would not meaningfully impact key inflation measures like CPI. 

So that means the Fed remains the main inflation fighter in DC. And fight they will, in the view of our economists, who expect they will hike rates another 2% over the balance of this year in order to curb economic activity. For investors, that means a higher chance of recession, and in the view of our U.S. equity strategy team, some remaining downside for stock prices in the near term. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.

As price to earnings multiples fall and inflation continues to weigh on the economy, long term earnings estimates may still be too high as the risk of a recession rises.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Tuesday, June 21st at 11 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it. 

Coming into the year, we had a very out of consensus view that valuations would fall at least 20% due to rising interest rates and tighter monetary policy from the Fed. We also believed earnings were at risk, given payback and demand, rising costs and inventory. With price to earnings multiples falling by 28% year to date, the de-rating process is no longer much of a call, nor is it out of consensus. Having said that, many others are still assuming much higher price to earnings multiples for year end S&P 500 price targets. In contrast, we have lowered our price to earnings targets even further as 10 year U.S. Treasury yields have exceeded our expectations to the upside. In short, the price to earnings multiple should still fall towards 14x, assuming Treasury yields and earnings estimates remain stable. Of course, these are big assumptions. 

At this point, a recession is no longer just a tail risk given the Fed's predicament with inflation. Indeed, this is the essence of our fire and ice narrative - the Fed having to tighten into a slowdown or worse. Our bear case for this year always assumed a recessionary outcome, but the odds were just 20%. Now they're closer to 35%, according to our economists. We would probably err a bit higher given our more negative view on the consumer and corporate profitability. From a market standpoint, this is just another reason why we think the equity risk premium could far exceed our fair value estimate of 370 basis points. Of course, the 10 year Treasury yield will not be static in a recession either, and would likely fall considerably if growth expectations plunge. For example, the equity risk premium exceeded 600 basis points during the last two recessions. We appreciate that the next recession is unlikely to be accompanied by a crisis like the housing bust in 2008, or a pandemic in 2020. Therefore, we're willing to accept a lower upside target of 500 basis points should a recession come to pass. 

Should the risk of recession increase to the point where it becomes the market's base case, it would also come alongside a much lower earnings per share forecast. In other words, a recession would imply a much lower trough for the S&P 500 of approximately 3000 rather than our base case of 3400 we've been using lately. 

As of Friday's close, our negative view is not nearly as fat of a pitch, with so much of the street now in our camp on both financial conditions and growth. Having said that, the upside is quite limited as well, making the near-term a bit of a gamble. Equity markets are very oversold, but they can stay oversold until market participants feel like the risk of recession has been extinguished or at least reduced considerably. We do not see that outcome in the near term. However, we can't rule it out either and appreciate that markets can be quite fickle in the short term on both the downside and the upside. What we can say with more certainty today versus a few months ago is that earnings estimates are too high, even in the event a recession is avoided. Our base case 3400 near-term downside target accounts for the kind of earnings risk we envision in the event a soft landing is accomplished. 

For us, the end game remains the same. We see a poor risk reward over the next 3 to 6 months, with recession risk rising in the face of very stubborn inflation readings. Valuations are closer to fair at this point, but hardly a bargain if earnings are likely to come down or a recession is coming. While investors have suffered quite a setback this year, we can't yet get bullish for more than just a bear market rally until recession arrives or the risk of one falls materially. At the stock level, we continue to favor late cycle defensives and companies with high operational efficiency. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcast app. It helps more people to find the show.

With so much going on in markets, some moves that may have been hot topics against a less chaotic backdrop, such as policy shifts towards shrinking central bank balance sheets, are hitting the back burner.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape and how we put those ideas together. It's Friday, June 17th, at 2 p.m. in London. 

There is so much going on in markets that events that would usually dominate discussions find themselves relegated. You'll emerge from an investor meeting having discussed everything from Fed policy to China's COVID response, and realize there was no time for a discussion of, say, the situation in Japan where the yen has just seen one of its sharpest declines in the last 30 years. 

I think that applies, in a notable way, to the conversation around central bank balance sheets. For much of the last decade, the bond buying of central banks, also known as quantitative easing, was the dominant market story. That buying is now reversing with the balance sheet of central banks in the U.S., Euro area, the UK and Japan, set to shrink by about $4 trillion between now and the end of 2023. And yet, with so much else going on, this quantitative tightening really feels like it's taking a backseat. 

One reason is that while the size of this balance sheet reduction is large, it is, for the moment, looking like it will be quite predictable, with central banks stating that these reductions will happen in a regular manner, almost regardless of market conditions. That's in sharp contrast to the situation in interest rates, where central bank policy has been rapidly changing, much less predictable and very dependent on incoming data. 

We were reminded of this again on Wednesday, when the Federal Reserve decided to raise interest rates by 75 basis points, on top of the 50 basis point rise they executed last month. In the press conference that followed Chair Powell emphasized how important incoming data would be in shaping further interest rate decisions. With every data point potentially shifting the near-term interest rate outlook, the steady decline of the balance sheet all of a sudden becomes less pressing. 

There is also a legitimate question of how much central bank bond purchases mattered in the first place. There's a whole branch of statistics designed to test how much of the variance of one thing, like stock prices, can be explained by changes in another thing, like central bank balance sheets. When we put the data through these rigorous tests, most of the stock market moves over the last 12 years are explained by factors other than the central bank balance sheet. 

And one final piece of trivia; bond prices have tended to do worse when Fed bond holdings were rising, and better when bond holdings were shrinking. That might sound counterintuitive, but consider the following. Quantitative easing usually began when the economy was weak and bond prices were already high, while quantitative tightening has occurred when the economy was strong and bond prices were already lower. It's just one more example that the balance sheet is one of many factors driving cross-asset performance. 

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you.

With home prices hitting new highs and inventory hitting new lows, the differences between now and the last housing bubble may help ease investors' worries that the market is about to burst. Co-Heads of U.S. Securitized Products Research Jim Egan and Jay Bacow discuss.

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Jay Bacow: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jay Bacow, Co-Head of U.S. Securitized Products Research here at Morgan Stanley. 

Jim Egan: And I'm Jim Egan, the other Co-Head of U.S. Securitized Products Research. 

Jay Bacow: And on this episode of the podcast, we'll be discussing the path for both housing prices, housing activity and agency mortgages through the end of the year. It's Thursday, June 16th, at noon in New York. 

Jay Bacow: Jim, it seems like every time we come on this podcast, there's another record in the housing market. And this time it's no different. 

Jim Egan: Absolutely not. Home prices just set a new record, 20.6% year over year growth. They set a new month over month growth record. Affordability, when you combine that growth in home prices with the increase we've seen in mortgage rates, we've deteriorated more in the past 12 months than any year that we have on record. And a lot of that growth can be attributed to the fact that inventory levels are at their lowest level on record. Consumer attitudes toward buying homes are worse than they've been since 1982. That's not a record, but you get my point. 

Jay Bacow: All right. So we're setting records for home prices. We're setting records for change in affordability. With all these broken records, investors are understandably a little worried that we might have another housing bubble. What do you think? 

Jim Egan: Look, given the run up in housing in the 2000s and the fact that we,ve reset the record for the pace of home price growth, investors can be permitted a little anxiety. We do not think there is a bubble forming in the U.S. housing market. There are a number of reasons for that, two things I would highlight. First, the pre GFC run up in home prices, that was fueled by lax lending standards that really elevated demand to what we think were unsustainable levels. And that ultimately led to an incredible increase in defaults, where borrowers with risky mortgages were not able to refinance and their only real option at that point was foreclosures. This time around, lending standards have remained at the tight end of historical ranges, while supply has languished at all time lows. And that demand supply mismatch is what's driving this increase in prices this time around. The second reason, we talked about affordability deteriorating more over the past 12 months than any year on record. That hit from affordability is just not as widely spread as it has been in prior mortgage markets, largely because most mortgages today are fixed rate. We're not talking about adjustable rate mortgages where current homeowners can see their payments reset higher. This time around a majority of borrowers have fixed rate mortgages with very affordable payments. And so they don't see that affordability pressure. What they're more likely to experience is being locked in at current rates, much less likely to list their home for sale and exacerbating that historically tight inventory environment that we just talked about. 

Jay Bacow: All right. So, you don't think we're going to have another housing bubble. Things aren't going to pop. So does that mean we're going to continue to set records? 

Jim Egan: I wouldn't say that we're going to continue to set records from here. I think that home prices and housing activity are going to go their separate ways. Home prices will still grow, they're just going to grow at a slower pace. Home sales is where we are really going to see decreases. Those affordability pressures that we've talked about have already made themselves manifest in existing home sales, in purchase applications, in new home sales, which have seen the biggest drops. Those kinds of decreases, we think those are going to continue. That lack of inventory, the lack of foreclosures from what we believe have been very robust underwriting standards, that keeps home prices growing, even if at a slower pace. That record level we just talked about? That was 20.6% year over year. We think that slows to 10% by December of this year, 3% by December of 2023. But we're not talking about home prices falling and we're not talking about a bubble popping. 

Jim Egan: But with that backdrop, Jay, you cover the agency mortgage backed securities markets, a large liquid way to invest in mortgages, how would you invest in this? 

Jay Bacow: So, buying a home is generally the single largest investment for individuals, but you can scale that up in the agency mortgage market. It's an $8.5 trillion market where the government has underwritten the credit risk and that agency paper provides a pretty attractive way to get exposure to the housing outlook that you've described. If housing activity is going to slow, there's less supply to the market. That's just good for investors. And the recent concern around the Fed running off their balance sheet, combined with high inflation, has meant that the spread that you get for owning these bonds looks really attractive. It's well over 100 basis points on the mortgages that are getting produced today versus treasuries. It hasn't been over 100 basis points for as long as it has since the financial crisis. Jim, just in the same way that you don't think we're having another housing bubble, we don't think mortgages are supposed to be priced for financial crisis levels. 

Jim Egan: Jay, thanks for taking the time to talk. 

Jay Bacow: Great speaking with you, Jim. 

Jim Egan: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

With concern high over inflation and tightening Fed policy, investors looking for practical solutions may want to take another look at the municipal bond market.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Wednesday, June 15th, at 10 a.m. in New York. 

It's been a tough few days for markets. With last week's inflation data showing yet another surprisingly high reading, both stock and bond markets have been selling off. The concern is that the Fed may have to get more aggressive in hiking rates in order to bring inflation under control. That would mean slower economic growth, which is a challenge for companies and stocks, and higher interest rates, which needs to be reflected in lower bond prices and higher bond yields. Understandably, investors are looking for practical solutions. 

One place we continue to favor is the muni bond market. It's been a volatile performer this year, and it's true that recently bonds haven't been a haven from broader market volatility. And that bumpy performance could go on a bit longer for munis as bond yields rise to price in a more aggressive Fed path. But that should change once the Fed's intentions are better understood. Plus, the coupons of most munis are tax exempt, something that provides extra value for investors who are keeping an eye on developments in Washington, D.C., where negotiations are gaining momentum on a package to raise taxes, to pay for investments in clean energy, health care and paying down the national debt. This means an already solid taxable equivalent yield of over 5% for investors in the top tax bracket, could improve further if D.C. acts to hike taxes. 

Of course, the rising recession risk from the Fed raising rates may have you concerned about muni credit quality, but in our view muni credit should be quite durable even if there is a recession. By our calculation, muni sectors got more federal aid than they needed to deal with the impacts of COVID, and the sharp economic recovery since then had mostly returned muni business activity and revenue growth to pre-COVID or better levels. And even if inflation persists, history suggests this shouldn't be a system wide credit challenge. Sure, municipalities' costs will go higher, but so would their revenues. 

So putting it together, bonds are probably a decent spot for investors to shelter during this volatility, and we think munis stand out among your bond options. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.

As central bank policy across the globe shifts from tight fiscal policy to tight monetary policy, the rising cost of capital will have long-term consequences for investors.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Graham Secker, Head of Morgan Stanley's European Equity Strategy Team. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives. I'll be talking about the rising cost of capital and its implications for European equities. It's Tuesday, June the 14th, at 2 p.m. in London. 

As we have discussed previously, we believe that we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the macro and market backdrops over the past couple of years, swapping the secular stagnation of the last decade with a new cycle where nominal growth is both higher and more volatile. 

An alternative way to think about this is that the policy dynamic has shifted from an environment of loose monetary and tight fiscal policy over the last two decades, to one of looser fiscal policy, but tighter monetary policy today. If this characterization proves to be true over the coming years, the longer term consequences for investors will be profound. 

While this may sound somewhat grandiose, it is worth noting that global interest rates fell to a record low in this last cycle. From such an unprecedented low, even a moderate increase in borrowing costs may feel significant, and we note that we have just witnessed the largest 2 year increase in 10 year U.S. Treasury yields since the early 1980s. 

The fact that we are starting a new and relatively fast rate hiking cycle, at the same time as central banks are shifting from quantitative easing to quantitative tightening, further magnifies the risk for spread products such as credit or peripheral debt, both of which have underperformed materially over the last couple of months. At this stage, we think it is this dynamic that is arguably weighing most on equity markets rather than the economic impact of higher borrowing costs. 

When thinking through the investment implications for European equity markets of this rise in the cost of capital, we make three points in ascending order of impact. 

First, the consequences of higher borrowing costs are likely to produce a relatively small hit to corporate profits. While we are concerned about a significant decline in corporate margins over the coming quarters, this is predominantly due to higher raw material prices and rising labor costs. In contrast, even a doubling of the effective interest rate on corporate debt should only take around 2.5% off of total European earnings. 

Second, we see a more significant impact from higher capital costs on equity valuations, as price to earnings ratios have exhibited a close negative correlation to both central bank policy rates and credit spreads over time. Hence, while European equity valuations are now beginning to look reasonably attractive after their decline this year, we think risks remain skewed to the downside over the summer, given a tricky backdrop of slowing growth, high and sticky inflation and hawkish central banks. 

Finally, the most significant impact from higher borrowing costs will, as ever, be felt by those entities that are most levered or require access to fresh funding. At this stage, we do not expect the ongoing increase in funding costs to generate a broader systemic shock across markets. However, we do see ample scope for idiosyncratic issues to emerge in the months ahead. Logically, identifying these issues in advance primarily requires due diligence at the stock level. However, from a top down perspective, the European sectors that are most correlated to credit spreads, and or have the weakest balance sheets, include autos, banks, consumer services, food retailing, insurance, telecoms and utilities. 

Ultimately, the volatility within asset markets that will accompany the largest upward shift in the cost of capital in over 30 years will create lots of opportunities for investors. However, for now, we recommend patience and await a better entry point later in the year. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today. 

With consumer sentiment hitting an all time low due to inflation concerns, the question investors should be asking is, are these risks to the economy properly priced into the market?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, June 13th, at 11 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it. 

Over time, the lion's share of stock returns is determined by earnings growth if one assumes that valuations are relatively stable. However, valuations are not stable and often hard to predict. In our experience, most investors don't spend nearly as much time trying to predict multiples as they do earnings. This is probably because it's hard to do consistently, and there are so many methodologies it's often difficult to know if you are using the right one. For equity strategists, predicting valuations is core to the job, so we spend a lot of time on it. 

Our methodology is fairly simple. There are just two components to our method; 10 year Treasury yields and the equity risk premium. 

At the end of last year, we argued the P/E at 21x was too high. From our vantage point, both ten year Treasury yields and the equity risk premium appeared to be mispriced. Treasury yields are more levered to inflation expectations and Fed policy. At year end 10 year Treasuries did not properly reflect the risk of higher inflation or the Fed's reaction to it. Today, we would argue it's not the case. In fact, 10 year Treasury yields may be pricing too much Fed tightening if growth continues to erode and recession risks increase further. 

In contrast to Treasury yields, the equity risk premium is largely a reflection of growth expectations. When growth is accelerating, the equity risk premium tends to be lower and vice versa. At year end, the equity risk premium is 315 basis points, well below the average of 375 basis points over the past 15 years. In short, the equity risk remaining was not reflecting the rising risks to growth that we expected coming into this year. Fast forward to today and the equity risk premium is even lower at just 300 basis points. Given the rising risk of slowing growth in earnings, this part of the price earnings ratio seems more mispriced today than 6 months ago. At the end of the day, we think 3400 represents a much better level of support for the S&P 500 and an area we would consider getting bullish. 

Last Friday, consumer sentiment in the U.S. hit an all time low due largely to concerns inflation is here to stay. This has been one of our greatest concerns this year with respect to demand and one of the areas we received the most pushback. We continually hear from many clients that the consumer is in such great shape due to the excess savings still available in checking accounts. However, this view does not take into account savings in stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies and other assets, which are down significantly this year. Furthermore, while most consumers have more cash on hand than pre-COVID, that cash just isn't going as far as it used to, and that is likely to restrain discretionary spending. 

Finally, we think it's important to point out that the latest reading is the lowest on record, and 45% lower than during the last time the Fed embarked on such an aggressive tightening campaign, and was able to orchestrate a soft landing. In other words, the consumer was in much better shape back then, and that probably helped the economy to stabilize and avoid a recession. Let's also keep in mind that inflation was dormant in 1994 relative to today and allowed the Fed to pause, a luxury they clearly do not have now given Friday's red hot Consumer Price Index report. 

Bottom line, the drop in sentiment not only poses a risk to the economy and market from a demand standpoint, but coupled with Friday's CPI print keeps the Fed on a hawkish path to fight inflation. In such an environment, we continue to recommend equity investors keep a defensive bias with overweighting utilities, health care and REITs until the price or earnings expectations come down further. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcast app. It helps more people to find the show. 

As inflation continues to rise beyond expectations, the Fed is set to meet next week, leaving markets to wonder if an acceleration in rate hikes might be in store this summer.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Robert Rosner, Senior U.S. Economist for Morgan Stanley Research. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about this morning's inflation data and how that may impact Fed discussions at next week's FOMC meeting. It's Friday, June 10th, at 2 p.m. in New York. 

This morning, we received the Consumer Price Index data for May that showed a faster than anticipated increase in both headline and core inflation. Inflation continues to be lifted by high food and energy prices, and the combination of the two have pushed inflation up to a new high on a year over year basis, to. 8.6%. That rise in inflation reflects not just gains in food and energy prices, but extremely broad based increases under the surface, with core goods prices continuing to reaccelerate and core services prices also remaining strong, reflecting continued upside in travel related airfares and hotels. While other factors like rents and owners' equivalent rents both jumped. Rents in particular posted their fastest sequential month on month pace of increase since 1987.  

That's really impo the Fed next week because this sets a tone of inflation that remains very elevated as the Fed sits down to discuss its policy. Moreover, many, including ourselves, had been expecting that the peak for inflation on a year over year basis would have been registered back in March. But today's data showed that CPI has reached a new high on a year over year basis. That raises uncertainty about the outlook for inflation. And Fed policymakers have expressed some concern about the possibility for some underlying reacceleration in inflation. 

We also saw at the same time that data from the University of Michigan Survey of Consumer Sentiment showed that both short and longer term household expectations for inflation have been on the rise. So the risks around inflation remain high, and as the Fed sits down next week policymakers are likely to see inflation as remaining a top of mind topic. 

We have been expecting the Fed to pursue a series of 50 basis point rate hikes as the FOMC seeks to tighten financial conditions in order to slow demand and eventually slow inflation. And markets after the inflation data moved very quickly to price in an even more hawkish path for Fed policy, with some risk that a 50 basis point rate hike might not be enough and that there might be some chance that the Fed could deliver a 75 basis point rate hike at some point over the summer. 

We'll hear from policymakers next week as to whether or not an acceleration in the pace of rate hikes is something that they see as an attractive option. But the bottom line here is the Fed's work is far from done. Inflation remains high, incoming data suggests that growth has moderated, but has not slowed enough to feel confident that inflation is likely to follow. It's going to be a tricky summer for Fed policymakers, and a tricky summer for data watchers as well, because each incremental inflation data point is likely to inform how Fed policymakers are likely to react and what that path for rate hikes is likely to look like over the summer and into the fall. 

Thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today. 

While many investors may be curious to know what other investors are thinking about current and future market trends, there’s a lot more to the calculation of investor sentiment than one might think.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape and how we put those ideas together. It's Thursday, June 9th, at 6 p.m. in London. 

I've found that investors are almost always interested in what other types of investors are doing. Some of this is curiosity, but a lot of it is interest in sentiment and a desire to try to quantify market emotion to give a better indicator of when to buy or sell. 

One can find a variety of metrics that portend to reflect this investor mood. Many of them move in nice, big, oscillating waves between fear and greed. But as anyone trying to use them as encountered, investing based on sentiment is harder in theory than practice. 

The first challenge, of course, is that there is little agreement in professional circles on exactly the best way to capture market emotion. Is it different responses to a regular investor survey? Is it the level of implied volatility in the market? Is it the flow of money in and out of different funds? The potential list goes on. 

Next, once you have an indicator, what's the right threshold to establish if it's telling you something is extreme? If you poll a thousand investors every week, maybe 70% of those investors being negative tells you the mood is sufficiently sour. But maybe the magic number is 80%, or maybe it's 60%. Defining positive or negative sentiment isn't always straightforward. 

Finally, there's the simple but important point that sometimes the crowd is right. Think of a long bull market like the 1990s. People were often optimistic about the stock market and correct to think so as prices kept rising. Meanwhile, people are often bearish in a bear market. We remember the dour mood that persisted throughout 2008. It certainly didn't stop stocks from going down. 

With all of this in mind, our research is focused on finding some ways to use sentiment measures more effectively. 

We think it makes sense to use a composite of different indicators, as true extremes are likely to show up across multiple approaches to measurement. Valuing both the level and direction of sentiment can be helpful. Rather than trying to catch an absolute extreme or market bottom, the best risk reward is often when sentiment is negative but improving. And sentiment is more useful to identify market lows than market peaks, as negativity and despair tend to be stronger, sharper emotions. Identifying peak optimism, at least in our work, is much harder. So don't beat yourself up if you can't find a signal that consistently flags market tops. 

Those ideas underlie the tools that we've built to try to turn market sentiment into signals as the age old debate around the true state of fear and greed continues throughout this year. 

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you. 

Under the combined stresses of dry weather, COVID, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, agricultural prices are spiking, and many countries are scrambling to combat the consequences to the global economy. Morgan Stanley Chief Global Economist Seth Carpenter explains.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Chief Global Economist. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, today I'll be talking about the surge in agricultural prices and some of the implications for the global economy. It's Wednesday, June 8th, at 1:30 p.m. in New York. 

Agricultural prices have jumped this year, and that surge has become one of the key topics of the moment, both on a domestic level and a global scale. The Russian invasion of Ukraine clearly contributed significantly to the runup in prices, but even before the war, dry weather and COVID-19 had already started to threaten the global food supply. Rising food prices pose many risks, particularly for lower income people and lower income countries. Even though I'm going to be talking mostly about cold economics today, the human toll of all of this is absolutely critical to keep in mind. In fact, we see the surge in food prices as a risk to the global economic recovery. When prices for necessities like food go up, lower income households just have to spend more on food. And that increased spending on food means they've got less money to spend on discretionary items. 

To put some numbers on how we got here, global food prices have surged about 66% since the start of COVID-19, and about 12% since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Dry weather had already affected crops, especially in Latin America and India. And remember, fertilizer is tightly linked to the petrochemical industry, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has complicated that situation, leaving fertilizer prices at all time highs. 

So what's been the response? Governments across developed markets and emerging markets have started enacting measures to try to contain their domestic prices. In the developed market world, these measures include attempts to boost domestic production so as to relieve some of the pressures. While in EM, some governments have opted to cut food taxes or put in place price controls. In addition, some governments have also imposed bans on exports of certain agricultural products. The side effect, though, is getting more trade disruptions in already tight commodity markets. 

Against this backdrop, there are two key consequences. First, consumption spending is likely to be lower than it would have been. And second, inflation is likely to rise because of the rise in food prices. And if we look at it across the globe, emerging markets really look more vulnerable to these shocks than developed markets. 

First, in terms of consumption spending, our estimates suggest that the recent rise in food prices might decrease real consumption spending throughout this year by about 1% in the U.S. and about 3% in Mexico, all else equal. Now, that said, not every component of spending gets affected uniformly. Historical data analysis suggests that the drop is heavily focused in durable goods spending, like for motor vehicles. And EMs are more exposed because they've got a higher share of food consumption in their overall consumption basket. 

Now, when it comes to inflation, we think that the recent spike in food prices, if it lasts for the rest of this year, it's probably going to add about 1.2 percentage points to headline Consumer Price Index inflation in emerging markets, and about 6/10 of a percentage point increase to inflation in DM. These are really big increases. Now why should the inflationary push be higher in emerging markets? First, just arithmetically, food represents a larger share of CPI in emerging markets than it does in DM, something like 24% versus 17%. And second, in emerging markets, inflation expectations tend to be less well anchored, and so a rise in prices in a critical component like food tends to spread out to lots of other components in inflation as well. 

So what's the bottom line here? Growth is slowing globally. Inflation is high. The surge in food prices is going to increase the risks for both of those. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy this show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or a colleague today.

As some provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act start to kick in and others are set to expire, the future of U.S. tax rates may hinge on the results of the upcoming midterm elections. Head of U.S. Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy Michael Zezas and Head of Global Valuation, Accounting and Tax Todd Castagno discuss.

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Michael Zezas: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of U.S. Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. 

Todd Castagno: And I'm Todd Castagno, Head of Global Valuation, Accounting and Tax for Morgan Stanley Research. 

Michael Zezas: And on this special edition of the podcast, we'll be talking about the 2022 U.S. midterm elections and the potential impact on individual and corporate taxes. It's Tuesday, June 7th, at 10:00 AM in New York. 

Michael Zezas: If you're a regular listener, you may have heard my conversation with our chief U.S. Economist, Ellen Zentner, last week about the economic implications of this year's midterm elections. This week, Todd Castagno and I are going to continue the midterm election topic because individual and corporate taxes could be set to increase starting this year. But the question is how high, when and what the impact from the election could be. So, Todd, you and I have talked about this and we agree that taxes are likely headed higher for both individuals and corporations. Maybe you can tell us why that is. 

Todd Castagno: Thanks, Michael. And it's really a driving function of how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed. And that's because Congress used the budget reconciliation legislation, which is primarily temporary. So, for instance, the individual provisions generally all expire at the end of 2025. And business tax increases have already started to phase in this year. So extension of the status quo for both businesses and individuals really is a function of the political landscape heading into midterms and then the next presidential election. 

Michael Zezas: Okay. So let's start with the individual taxes. Maybe you can name some provisions set to expire and what the changes would be. 

Todd Castagno: So Michael, let's first provide an overview of what the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did for individuals. First, it reduced individual tax rates. Second, it almost doubled the standard deduction, meaning fewer taxpayers require itemized deductions. It provided a generous 20% deduction for small businesses, and pass-through businesses. It provided a much more generous child tax care credit, that's also refundable. And then the alternative minimum tax was reduced, so fewer taxpayers were caught in that tax. All these provisions are set to expire at the end of 2025 if Congress does not act. 

Michael Zezas: Let's shift over to corporate taxes. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered the corporate tax rate to 21% in 2017. Is there a chance we could see that climb? And to what level? 

Todd Castagno: That's true. One of the only permanent items of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. However, starting this year, there are other tax increases within the corporate tax system. For instance, the requirement to amortize R&D costs over 5 years starts this year. That will primarily affect technology companies. And then there's elimination of favorable media expensing for capital expenditures, that starts to phase out next year, and that primarily would impact manufacturing and industrial companies. And then there's more restrictive deductibility of interest expense. So these in conjunction, will raise tax obligations. And it really depends on the political climate of how these get extended, and if that 21% corporate rate may nudge higher. 

Michael Zezas: Todd. Last October, you and I talked in the podcast about a two pillar tax overhaul which would come out of global tax reform. Nine months later, how do you see that playing out? 

Todd Castagno: So there's an ongoing effort to A, change the mix of which countries get to tax corporate income and B, the establishment of a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%. The wheels are still in motion, but let's say the bus has slowed down. For instance, in the U.S., the required reforms are part of the build back better legislation, which has recently stalled. And then in Europe, nearly unanimous agreement, but they're still one or two states that are not fully on board. 

Todd Castagno: Michael, I want to turn it back to you. Investors and policymakers clearly have some worries about inflation risks. How will that factor into what kinds of effective tax increases would be palatable for lawmakers? 

Michael Zezas: Sure. Policymakers in Washington, D.C. have become really sensitive to inflation. And so tax increases now serve a purpose as a tool for Democrats to achieve some of their spending goals, like investing in clean energy, but doing so without contributing to inflation by increasing government deficits. So given that if Democrats manage to get a new spending bill focused on energy across the finish line, the tax increases will likely need to match that spending. So that keeps corporate tax increases and tax increases focused on high income earners on the table. 

Todd Castagno: Finally, before we close, I'm curious if you've heard anything from our economist or equity strategist on what the impact will be on growth, or corporate bottom lines, if some or all of these expirations occur? 

Michael Zezas: Well, tax increases mean higher costs for companies and households. So this becomes one of several factors that our equity strategists say will contribute to the crimping of the bottom line of U.S. companies. And they don't think that's in the price of the stock market quite yet. And so what that ultimately means is that the volatility we've been experiencing in markets is something they think is going to continue. 

Michael Zezas: Todd, thank you so much for talking. 

Todd Castagno: Great talking with you, Michael. 

Michael Zezas: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show. 

While markets look forward to an acceleration in earnings growth and a subsequent rise in valuations over the next year, there are risks to this outlook that investors may want to consider before abandoning a defensive position.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, June 6th, at 11 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it. 

Over the past several months, we've been highlighting the declining trend in earnings revision breath. However, it's been a slow moving train and we're barely below zero at this point. This is why forward 12 month earnings estimates are still grinding higher for the S&P 500, and one reason why stocks have rallied over the past few weeks. But now valuations have risen back to 17.5x earnings, despite a rising 10 year Treasury yield. In order for this to make sense, however, one must take the view that earnings growth will reaccelerate later this year. Time will tell, but we think S&P 500 earnings growth will slow further rather than reaccelerate. 

Some have argued these revisions were fully priced, with the major averages down more than 20% year to date. In short, the earnings risk is now understood and the market is looking forward to better growth next year. In the absence of further revisions in the near term, that view can hold up for now. However, if earnings revisions don't reaccelerate, we think the price is too high. This is why we think it could be difficult for the equity market to make much upward progress this summer or fall from current levels. Either the price needs to come down to reflect the further earnings risk we foresee or the earnings need to fall. We think both will happen over the course of the second and third quarter earnings season as companies come to the confessional one by one. In the absence of a recession or a shock like the COVID lockdowns, negative earnings revisions typically take longer than they should, and this time is likely to be no different. 

Therefore, we remain open minded to the idea of stocks hanging around current levels and even rallying further in the near term, especially if there is some kind of pause or cease fire in the Russia Ukraine war. However, even if that were to happen, we don't think this reverses the fire and ice that is now well-established but incomplete. Bottom line, the bear market rally that began a few weeks ago can continue for a few more weeks until the Fed makes it crystal clear they remain hawkish and earnings revisions fall well into negative territory. That combination should ultimately take the S&P 500 down towards our 3400 target by mid to late August. 

As we've been highlighting all year, equity investors should be more focused on single stocks and relative opportunities across sectors. In that regard, real estate has seen the strongest earnings revisions over the past 4 weeks. Food, beverage and tobacco, commercial and professional services and materials have also seen a positive change in revisions. Finally, capital goods and the overall industrial sector have fared relatively well over the past 4 weeks, as their absolute revisions have remained flat. 

The weakest revisions have come from consumer and tech industry groups, two areas we remain underweight. Food and staples retailing revisions have collapsed over the past 4 weeks, as concerns over cost pressures on top of already thin margins hit the space. Consumer discretionary has also continued to see weakness in revisions over the past 4 weeks, despite some modest relief more recently over the past 2 weeks. 

Bottom line, U.S. stocks appear in the midst of a bear market rally that could run a few weeks longer. The Nasdaq and small cap indices will outperform under that view in the short term. However, we remain defensively positioned into the fall when a more durable low in equity markets is likely to coincide with a bottom in earnings growth. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcast app. It helps more people to find the show.

Original Release on May 17th, 2022: As we forecast the remainder of an already uncertain 2022, new questions have emerged around economic data, inflation and the potential for a recession. Chief Cross Asset Strategist Andrew Sheets and Chief Global Economist Seth Carpenter discuss.

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Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets. Morgan Stanley's Chief Cross-Asset Strategist. 

Seth Carpenter: And I'm Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Chief Global Economist. 

Andrew Sheets: And today on the podcast, we'll be talking about our outlook for strategy and markets and the challenges they may face over the coming months. It's Tuesday, May 17th, at 4 p.m. in London. 

Seth Carpenter: And it's 11 a.m. in New York. 

Andrew Sheets: So Seth, the global Morgan Stanley Economic and Strategy Team have just completed our mid-year outlook process. And, you know, this is a big collaborative effort where the economists think about what the global economy will look like over the next 12 months, and the strategists think about what that could mean for markets. So as we talk about that outlook, I think the economy is the right place to start. As you're looking across the global economy and thinking about the insights from across your team, how do you think the global economy will look over the next 12 months and how is that going to be different from what we've been seeing? 

Seth Carpenter: So I will say, Andrew, that we titled our piece, the economics piece, slowing or stopping with a question mark, because I think there is a great deal of uncertainty out there about where the economy is going to go over the next six months, over the next 12 months. So what are we looking at as a baseline? Sharp deceleration, but no recession. And I say that with a little bit of trepidation because we also try to put out alternative scenarios, the way things could be better, the way things could be worse. And I have to say, from where I'm sitting right now, I see more ways for the global economy to be worse than the global economy to be better than our baseline scenario. 

Andrew Sheets: So Seth, I want to dig into that a little bit more because we're seeing, you know, more and more people in the market talk about the risk of a slowdown and talk about the risk of a recession. And yet, you know, it's also hard to ignore the fact that a lot of the economic data looks very good. You know, we have one of the lowest unemployment rates that we've seen in the U.S. in some time. Wage growth is high, spending activity all looks quite high and robust. So, what would drive growth to slow enough where people could really start to think that a recession is getting more likely?

Seth Carpenter: So here's how I think about it. We've been coming into this year with a fair amount of momentum, but not a perfectly pristine outlook on the economy. If you take the United States, Q1, GDP was actually negative quarter on quarter. Now, there are a lot of special exceptions there, inventories were a big drag, net exports were a big drag. Underlying domestic spending in the U.S. held up reasonably solidly. But the fact that we had a big drag in the U.S. from net exports tells you a little bit about what's going on around the rest of the world. If you think about what's going on in Europe, we feel that the economy in the eurozone is actually quite precarious. The Russian invasion of Ukraine presents a clear and critical risk to the European economy. I mean, already we've seen a huge jump in energy prices, we've seen a huge jump in food prices and all of that has got to weigh on consumer spending, especially for consumers at the bottom end of the income distribution. And what we see in China is these wave after wave of COVID against the policy of COVID zero means that we're going to have both a hit to demand from China and some disruption to supply. Now, for the moment, we think the disruption to supply is smaller than the hit to demand because there is this closed loop approach to manufacturing. But nevertheless, that shock to China is going to hurt the global economy. 

Andrew Sheets: So Seth, the other major economic question that's out there is inflation, and you know where it's headed and what's driving it. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what our forecasts for inflation look like going forward. 

Seth Carpenter: Our view right now is that inflation is peaking or will be peaking soon. I say that again with a fair amount of caution because that's been our view for quite some time, and then we get these additional surprises. It's clear that in many, many economies, a huge amount of the inflation that we are seeing is coming from energy and from food. Now energy prices and food prices are not likely to fall noticeably any time soon. But after prices peak, if they go sideways from there, the inflationary impulse ends up starting to fade away and so we think that's important. We also think, the COVID zero policy in China notwithstanding, that there will be some grudging easing of supply chain frictions globally, and that's going to help bring down goods inflation as well over time. So we think inflation is high, we think inflation will stay high, but we think that it's roughly peaked and over the balance of this year and into next year it should be coming down.

Andrew Sheets: As you think about central bank policy going forward, what do you think it will look like and do you think it can get back to, quote, normal? 

Seth Carpenter: I will say, when it comes to monetary policy, that's a question we want to ask globally. Right now, central banks globally are generically either tight or tightening policy. What do I mean by that? Well, we had a lot of EM central banks in Latin America and Eastern Europe that had already started to hike policy a lot last year, got to restrictive territory. And for those central banks, we actually see them starting to ease policy perhaps sometimes next year. For the rest of EM Asia, they're on the steady grind higher because even though inflation had started out being lower in the rest of EM Asia than in the developed market world, we are starting to see those inflationary pressures now and they're starting to normalize policy. And then we get to the developed market economies. There's hiking going on, there's tightening of policy led by the Fed who's out front. What does that mean about getting back to an economy like we had before COVID? One of the charts that we put in the Outlook document has the path for the level of GDP globally. And you can clearly see the huge drop off in the COVID recession, the rapid rebound that got us most of the way, but not all the way back to where we were before COVID hit. And then the question is, how does that growth look as we get past the worst of the COVID cycle? Six months ago, when we did the same exercise, we thought growth would be able to be strong enough that we would get our way back to that pre-COVID trend. But now, because supply has clearly been constrained because of commodity prices, because of labor market frictions, monetary policy is trying to slow aggregate demand down to align itself with this restricted supply. And so what that means is, in our forecast at least, we just never get back to that pre-COVID trend line. 

Seth Carpenter: All right, Andrew, but I've got a question to throw back at you. So the interplay between economics and markets is really uncertain right now. Where do you think we could be wrong? Could it be that the 3%, ten-year rate that we forecast is too low, is too high? Where do you think the risks are to our asset price forecasts? 

Andrew Sheets: Yeah, let me try to answer your question directly and talk about the interest rate outlook, because we are counting on interest rates consolidating in the U.S. around current levels. And our thinking is partly based on that economic outlook. You know, I think where we could be wrong is there's a lot of uncertainty around, you know, what level of interest rate will slow the economy enough to balance demand and supply, as you just mentioned. And I think a path where U.S. interest rates for, say, ten year treasuries are 4% rather than 3% like they are today, I think that's an environment where actually the economy is a little bit stronger than we expect and the consumer is less impacted by that higher rate. And it's going to take a higher rate for people to keep more money in savings rather than spending it in the economy and potentially driving that inflation. So I think the path to higher rates and in our view does flow through a more resilient consumer. And those higher rates could mean the economy holds up for longer but markets still struggle somewhat, because those higher discount rates that you can get from safe government bonds mean people will expect, mean people will expect a higher interest rate on a lot of other asset classes. In short, we think the risk reward here for bonds is more balanced. But I think the yield move so far this year has been surprising, it's been historically extreme, and we have to watch out for scenarios where it continues. 

Seth Carpenter: Okay. That's super helpful. But another channel of transmission of monetary policy comes through exchange rates. So the Fed has clearly been hiking, they've already done 75 basis points, they've lined themselves up to do 50 basis points at at least the next two meetings. Whereas the ECB hasn't even finished their QE program, they haven't started to raise interest rates yet. The Bank of Japan, for example, still at a really accommodative level, and we've seen both of those currencies against the dollar move pretty dramatically. Are we in one of those normal cycles where the dollar starts to rally as the Fed begins to hike, but eventually peaks and starts to come off? Or could we be seeing a broader divergence here? 

Andrew Sheets: Yeah. So I think this is to your point about a really interesting interplay between markets and Federal Reserve policy, because what the Fed is trying to do is it's trying to slow demand to bring it back in line with what the supply of things in the economy can provide at at current prices rather than it at higher prices, which would mean more inflation. And there's certainly an important interest rate part to that slowing of demand story. There's a stock market part of the story where if somebody's stock portfolio is lower, maybe they're, again, a little bit less inclined to spend money and that could slow the economy. But the currency is also a really important element of it, because that's another way that financial markets can feed back into the real economy and slow growth. And if you know you're an American company that is an exporter and the dollar is stronger, you likely face tougher competition against overseas sellers. And that acts as another headwind to the economy. So we think the dollar strengthens a little bit, you know, over the next month or two, but ultimately does weaken as the market starts to think enough is priced into the Fed. We're not going to get more Federal Reserve interest rates than are already implied by the market, and that helps tamp down some of the dollar strength that we've been seeing. 

Andrew Sheets: And Seth thanks for taking the time to talk. 

Seth Carpenter: Andrew, it's been great talking to you. 

Andrew Sheets: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today. 

In the years since the Global Financial Crisis, central bank policy has been supportive and predictable. But as the economic backdrop changes, shifts in policy will come with risks and rewards.

-----Transcript-----

Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape and how we put those ideas together. It's Thursday, June 2nd, at 2 p.m. in London. 

The period that followed the global financial crisis was filled with paradoxes. It was a period of serially disappointing economic growth, but exceptional asset class returns. Wealth exploded in relation to the economy, while capital investment withered. It was a period of such fragility that it demanded enormous policy support, yet produced remarkably consistent patterns of performance. 

For example, in 9 of the last 12 years, growth outperformed value, bonds outperformed cash and stocks outperformed commodities. That consistency in performance was mirrored by consistency in the economy. Generally speaking, 2010 through 2021 saw low inflation, weak growth and central bank policy that was both supportive and predictable. 

All of these trends are changing. Year to date, commodities have outperformed stocks, cash has outperformed bonds, and value has outperformed growth. The economic backdrop is also different; growth and inflation are high, capital investment is strong and global central bank policy has been more restrictive and less predictable. 

These shifts have risks, but consider the alternative. Over the last decade, it was common to hear investors worry about the bogged down state of the global economy, with weak growth that required large monetary policy support as far as the eye could see. Low growth and low rates clearly were not optimal. 

However, central banks are now adjusting their strategy. It's easy to argue that policy stayed too accommodative for too long. But hindsight is cheap and easy. What matters now is that policy is normalizing in a significant way. 

More importantly, these shifts are accomplishing central bank goals. Markets assume that central banks in the US, the eurozone and Australia can raise interest rates further without material economic declines. Inflation expectations are now falling, the housing market is cooling and credit risk premiums are back near the long run average, all the while labor markets in the US and Europe remain strong. 

In short, there is a lot of talk about whether central banks are making a mistake, especially given the recent market volatility. But looking at the results overall, we suspect central banks are reasonably happy with how things are going so far. 

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to Thoughts on the Market on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you.