Hello and I'm Ellen Zettner, Chief U.S. Economist for Morgan Stanley.

And I'm Adam Vergadamo, U.S. Equity Strategist.

And today on the podcast, we'll look beyond the current headlines on COVID-19 and talk a little bit

about life after COVID for the economy and markets.

It's Tuesday, July 28th at 11 a.m. in New York.

Adam, you and I collaborated on a couple of reports that looked at the pace of recovery in the

U.S. and just to catch listeners up to speed, what we found was at the pace of the recovery over the next 18 months really holds the key to the medium term outlook.

And I think two big variables for that recovery are timing of a a viable vaccine and the willingness of consumers

to spend in this environment.

So today I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the work your team has done on identifying

major investment themes that could arise from the impact of COVID-19.

Do you want to walk us through some of those major takeaways?

I think to start, we're looking at a medium-term horizon, and I think what we're talking about is adjusting to a new normal.

A new normal that's going to require new forms of investment, new ways for people to work.

Many Americans are of course working from home now, changes to consumer behavior and our spending patterns.

And I think these moves, in many cases, are going to involve doing more with less.

These moves focus on investments that enhance productivity and ultimately I think these can be longer term positives for the economy as well as the stock market.

So the approach we took in trying to put together these themes was to ask

our analysts who cover about a thousand stocks in the US, what are you seeing in the world

in life after COVID. And what emerged was about 50 different

trends that we could potentially invest on or think about and those grouped into

six kind of broader themes and I'm happy to kind of walk through some of those as we go through the podcast today.

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