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Recession sounds very monstrous and it sounds daunting and negative. In some cases it is,

but a recession could simply just be a recessive growth coming off of the hyper growth we saw during

the pandemic. Hello and welcome to the Baron StreetWise podcast. I'm Jack Howe. The voice you just

heard is Chris Heise. He's the chief investment officer at Merrill and Bank of America private bank

and in a moment he'll answer our questions about what to make of this year's rip roaring stock

market rally. We're also going to say a few words about this past weeks shrugged off downgrade

of the U.S. government's credit rating and will attempt to solve a Medtech mystery.

This is a pretty good spot for like a Scooby-Doo background music thing. What do you think?

How about something non-scooby-Doo but royalty free?

You know what? That sounds more like treasury music. Let's get right to the downgrade.

Listening in is our audio producer Meta. Hi Meta. Hi Jack.

There was a downgrade of U.S. debt this past Tuesday by Fitch ratings. Took the rating from

AAA to AA plus and the response was I don't know pretty darn quiet. Don't you think? Yeah pretty muted.

I mean there was a lot of political news at the same time. There was a new set of Trump indictments

and I think that took a lot of media attention. So maybe not as many people were watching this

or maybe it's that there already was a downgrade back in 2011 by S&P so this is

nothing really new for people or the response of financial markets was fairly muted. So

for whatever reason I don't feel like there was a big response to this downgrade.

...