Episode Details

Morgan Stanley’s midyear outlook defied the conventional view in a number of ways. Our analysts Serena Tang and Vishy Tirupattur push back on the pushback to their conclusions, explaining the thought process behind their research. 

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Serena Tang: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Serena Tang, Morgan Stanley's Chief Cross-Asset Strategist

Vishy Tirupattur: And I'm Vishy Tirupattur, Morgan Stanley's Chief Fixed Income Strategist.

Serena Tang: Today's topic, pushback to our outlook.

It's Friday, June 6th at 10am in New York.

Morgan Stanley Research published our mid-year outlook about two weeks ago, a collaborative effort across the department, bringing together our economist views with our strategist high conviction ideas. Right now, we're recommending investors to be overweight in U.S. equities, overweight in core fixed income like U.S. treasuries, like U.S. IG corporate credit. But some of our views are out of consensus.

So, I want to talk to you, Vishy, about pushback that you've been getting and how we pushback on the pushback.

Vishy Tirupattur: Right. So, the biggest pushback I've gotten is a bit of a dissonance between our economics narrative and our markets narrative. Our economics narrative, as you know, calls for a significant weakening of economic growth. From about – for the U.S. – 2.5 percent growth in 2024 goes into 1 percent in 2025 and in 2026. And Fed doesn't cut rates in 2025, and cuts seven times in 2026.

And if you look at a somewhat uninspiring outlook for the U.S. economy from our economists – reconciling an uninspiring economic outlook on the U.S. economy with the constructive view we have on U.S. assets, equities, credit, treasuries – that's been a source of contention. So, reconciling an uninspiring outlook on the U.S. economy with a constructive view on risk assets, as well as risk-free assets in the U.S. economy – so, equities, credit, as well as government bonds – has been a somewhat contentious issue.

So how do we reconcile this? So, my pushback to the pushback is the following; that they are different plot lines across different asset classes. So, our economists have slowing of the economy – but not an outright recession. Our economists don't have rate cuts in 2025 but have seven rate cuts in 2026.

So, if you look at the total number of rate cuts that are being priced in by the markets today, roughly about two rate cuts in [20]25, and about between two and three rate cuts in 2026, we expect greater policy easing than what's currently priced in the markets. So that makes sense for our constructive view on interest rates, and in government bonds and in duration that makes sense.

From a credit point of view, we enter this point with a much better credit fundamentals in leverage and coverage terms. We have the emergence of a total yield-based buyer base, which we think will be largely intact at our expectations, and you layer on top of that – the idea that growth slows but doesn't fall into recession is also constructive for higher quality credit. So that explains our credit view.

From an equities view, the drawdowns that we experienced in April, our equity strategists think marks the worst outcomes from a policy point of view that we could have had. That has already happened. So looking forward, they look for EPS growth over the course of the next 12 months. They look for benefits of deregulation to kick in. So, along with that seven rate cuts, get them to be comfortable in being constructive about their views on equities. So all of that ties together.

Serena Tang: And I think what you mentioned ar