Welcome to our exchanges at Goldman Sachs Markets Update for Friday, December 18th.

Each week we've checked the leader across the firm to get a quick take on what they're watching in the markets.

I'm Jake Seawert, Global Head of Corporate Communications here at the firm,

and I'm delighted today to be joined by Richard Ramston, who runs our Financialist group

in Goldman Sachs research.

Today, Richard will give us an update on the

financial services industry and the market backdrop going into 2021. Richard

welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me again. So you just held your annual financial services conference virtually this year.

What was the tone from the leaders in the industry regarding the state of the recovery?

I would say every bank feels much better about the world

than they did in October.

And I think the reason is simple, which is since most of these banks last spoke, which was early October, you now have

the prospects of a successful vaccine being rolled out, and it's clear that that has changed their economic outlook, especially

over the next 12 to 24 months. But I think in addition to that these banks are

looking at the activity that they can see across their platform in the fourth quarter and there's a number of encouraging trends so

Consumer spending is actually increasing it's hard to, given where we were back in March and April,

that consumer spending in aggregate

is actually up modestly in December

compared to where we were last year.

Loans that were put into forbearance back in March or April have continued to decline.

So these banks are feeling a lot better about the reserves that they have against their credit losses.

And corporate confidence has also improved, especially because I think a lot of these

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