Morgan Stanley betragter august og september som to risikable måneder for investorerne. Der er ikke så gode nyheder i vente som i juli, hvor der kom en række regnskaber fra selskaberne, og der er i disse måneder ikke udsigt til nye hjælpeprogrammer. Desuden kan en såkaldt anden corona-bølge sætte ind med nye fyringer. Dét, der kan påvirke markederne mest, er den amerikanske valgkamp. August har altid være vanskelig for investorerne under en valgkamp. Banken tror fortsat, at vi står over for et opsving, men de kommende to måneder bliver en udfordring.
Bracing for Challenges Ahead
While July contains a number of potentially positive market events, August and September could present a number of potentially problematic ones.
At Morgan Stanley, we’ve been constructive about the prospects for the global economic recovery and what this means for financial markets. As we think out over the next 12 months, we continue to hold that view, believing that the global economy will continue to improve and that markets are not yet priced for this to occur.
But with that in mind, I wanted to focus on a specific caveat to this story. While myself and my colleagues continue to believe strongly in this 12-month recovery, and while July contains several potentially positive market events, I’m really struggling to see any good news over the months of August and September. In the short term, we need to brace ourselves for a more challenging investment environment.
The contrast between this month and the two that follow looks stark. July is seeing companies report their second quarter earnings, which provides a helpful clarity on just how difficult conditions are. It should see the U.S. Congress pass an additional round of financial support. And it should also see important progress for the European Recovery Fund, something that we’ve thought is an important shift towards more federalism in Europe’s regional economic architecture.
But August and September are different. They lack, at least by our measure, any of the potentially helpful events and, in their place, contain a number of potentially problematic ones.
With the US election approaching, August has historically marked a period where markets tend to do worse leading up to this event, perhaps as investors decide they’d rather wait to know the ultimate outcome. This two-month window could also see important updates on whether schools and universities open, which could have a significant impact on the economy and overall sentiment.
And these two months also bring us closer to the so-called “second wave” of the virus, which our biotechnology team at Morgan Stanley has long assumed will occur sometime in the late autumn.
August and September also suffer from more difficult comparisons. As discussed on this program, Morgan Stanley economists have had an out of consensus forecast for a V-shaped global recovery.
But because recent data has been so strong and US COVID-19 dynamics have been getting worse, the risk for some near-term disappointment is now rising. My colleague Ellen Zentner, Chief U.S. Economist at Morgan Stanley, now sees rising odds that the US will once again report a net loss of jobs in one of the next two monthly jobs reports that are coming up.
Over the last several months, we’ve tried our best to be optimistic in the face of what seemed like a continuous wave of bad news. We still think that investors are too pessimistic about the longrun economic outlook. And we still believe that the US and global economy are now in the early stages of a new economic cycle.
But in the near term, investors should brace for more challenging market conditions.
