Welcome to our exchanges at Goldman Sachs Markets Update for Friday, October 2nd.

Each week we check with the leader across the firm to get a quick take on what he or she is

watching in markets.

I'm Jake Stewart Global Head of Corporate Communications here at the firm and today I'm

delighted to be joined by Aaron Riley of the Markets Coverage Group in our

private wealth management business.

We last had Aaron on the show in February, late February, which seems like a lifetime ago,

really was a lifetime ago.

Aaron was actually the first podcast guest to talk about coronavirus and obviously that was a different world than the one we're zooming from today.

Today we'll get Aaron's take on key issues on the minds of her clients for market volatility to the upcoming presidential election in the US to the post vaccine economy and much, much more.

Welcome back, Aaron. Thanks for joining us today.

Thanks so much for having me. So when you were on in February, you talked about how you were watching the Vicks, which is a measure of volatility.

As the coronavirus situation around the world started to worsen. That index had shot above 35 at the time and proceeded to

climb above 80 in March, which is an elevated number, to say the least, the highest since the

financial crisis.

What's happened to the big sense and what can we read into that?

So it was certainly a very different world when we last spoke.

New York was several weeks away from the lockdown and terms like social distancing, self-isulating, and N95 were barely in our vocabulary.

The market was just starting to sound some alarm bells, but the world was still operating in a relatively normal fashion.

So when we taped the VIX was in the mid-30s, and the S&P was around 2950.

Despite all that has happened since,

today the Vix is actually lower in the mid-20s

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