Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross Asset

Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing 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 5th at 2 p.m. in London.

This podcast was launched so that we could address the questions that we think are on the minds of investors and so there seems

to be an obvious question we should address it's been coming up a lot this week how on

earth can markets be climbing given what's going on at the moment from the current

public health crisis to record unemployment to large

protests against systemic racism that have been happening across the US.

This is a hard question to answer because of what markets are and are not.

They're impacted by psychology psychology but they themselves have no

feelings. They're governed by rules and regulators but have no leader. They're used as

shorthand for the state and health of the economy but frequently diverge from it. Still we think there are ways to think

about these issues. Regarding the economy and the public health crisis our view has

been that markets usually react more to the rate of change of something than the

level. Our economists continue to believe that April

represented the low for global economic activity and that data will improve going

forward. Global COVID-19 numbers have also been improving and the success of

certain countries shows that defeating the virus is

within our capacity.

As I discussed with my colleague Matthew Harrison recently on this podcast, the market's next focus

...