Episode Details

Our analysts Andrew Sheets and Vishwas Patkar take stock of the U.S. credit market, noting which segments are on firm footing going into a period of slower growth.

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Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts On the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley.

Vishwas Patkar: And I'm Vishwas Patkar, Head of U.S. Credit Strategy at Morgan Stanley.

Andrew Sheets: Today on the program, we're going to have the first in a series of conversations covering our outlook for credit around the world.

It's Wednesday, June 4th at 2pm in London.

Vishwas Patkar: And 9am in New York.

Andrew Sheets: Vishwas, along with many of our colleagues at Morgan Stanley, we recently updated our 12-month outlook for credit markets around the world. Focusing on your specialty, the U.S., how do you read the economic backdrop and what do you think it means for credit at a high level?

Vishwas Patkar: So, our central scenario of slowing growth, somewhat firm inflation and no rate cuts from the Fed until the first quarter of 2026 – when I put all of that together, I view that as somewhat mixed for credit. It's good for certain segments of the market, not as good for others.

I think the positive on the one side is that with the recent de-escalation in trade tensions, recession risks have gone lower. And that's reflected in our economists' view as well. I think for an asset class like credit, avoiding that drill downside tail I think is important. The other positive in the market today is that the level of all in yields you can get across the credit spectrum is very compelling on many different measures.

The negative is that we are still looking at a fair bit of slowing in economic activity, and that's a big downshift from what we've been used to in the past few years. So, I would say we're certainly not in the Goldilocks environment that we saw for credit through the second half of last year. And it's important here for investors to be selective around what they invest in within the credit market.

Andrew Sheets: So, Vishwas, you kind of alluded to this, but you know, 2025 has been a year that so far has been dominated by a lot of these large kind of macro questions around, you know, what's going to happen with tariffs. Big moves in interest rates, big moves in the U.S. dollar. But credit is an asset class that's, you know, ultimately about lending to companies. And so how do you see the credit worthiness of U.S. corporates? And how much of a risk is there that with interest rates staying higher for longer than we expected at the start of the year – that becomes a bigger problem?

Vishwas Patkar: Yeah, sure. I think it's a very important question Andrew because I think taking a call on markets based on the gyrations in headlines is very hard. But in some ways, I think this question of the credit worthiness of U.S. companies is more important and I think it really helps us filter the signal from the noise that we've seen in markets so far this year.

I would say broadly, the health of corporate balance sheets is pretty good and, in some ways, I think it's maybe a more distinguishing feature of this cycle where corporate credit overall is on a firmer footing going into a period of slower growth – than what we may have seen in prior instances. And you can sort of look at this balance sheet health along a few different lines.

In aggregate, we haven't really seen credit markets grow a lot in the last few years. M&A activity, which is usually a harbinger of corporate aggression, has also been fairly muted in