This is Exchanges at Goldman Sachs and I'm Allison Nathan a senior strategist in Goldman Sachs Research.

In this episode, we'll be looking at the accelerating recovery in Europe.

To do that, I'm joined by Yari Stein, chief European economist for Goldman Sachs Research

and Rich Piberatsky, who manages

European Cash Equities Trading in our Global Markets Division.

We'll first turn to Yari to discuss the economy and where fiscal and monetary

policies stand for the region and are likely headed.

Yari, welcome to the program.

Hi, Edison.

Yari, the economic outlook for Europe has brightened in recent months.

We've seen a significant step up in the

vaccine rollout that has facilitated that. But this isn't the first time that

growth has started to look better in Europe, but then ended up disappointing. Why is this time different?

Well we think it's different because we're getting very encouraging information

across a range of metrics in Europe. So first I would highlight that we have seen pretty sharp

improvements now on the medical side. COVID cases and hospitalizations are now down pretty sharply, really across the Euro area.

Vaccinations are up. We think we're on track to reach 50% of the population later in June.

And I think even though concerns around the new variants

persist, particularly the delta variant here in the UK,

we ultimately think that the evidence suggests that it's a manageable risk as long as the vaccine rollout continues.

Second, we have already seen significant reopening steps.

Plans are for that to continue into the summer. seen significant reopening steps.

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