How Waning American Dominance Could Move Yields

Lisa Shalett, our Wealth Management CIO, and Andrew Sheets, our Head of Corporate Credit Research, conclude their discussion of American Exceptionalism, factoring in fixed income, in the second of a two-part episode.
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Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley. Lisa Shalett: And I'm Lisa Shalett, Chief Investment Officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. Andrew Sheets: Today – a today a concluding look at the theme of American exceptionalism and how it factors into fixed income. It's Thursday, July 31st at 4pm in London. Lisa Shalett:  And it's 11am here in New York. So, Andrew, it's my turn to ask you some questions. And yesterday we talked a lot about equity markets, globalization, some of the broader macro shifts. But I wanted to zoom in on the credit markets today and one of our themes in the American Exceptionalism paper was the constraints of debts and deficits and how they play in. With U.S. debts level soaring and interest costs rising, how concerned should investors be? Andrew Sheets: So, you alluded to this a bit on our discussion yesterday that we are in a very interesting divide where you have inequality between very well-off companies and weaker companies that aren't doing as well. You have a lot of division within households between those who are, doing better and struggling more with the rate environment. But you know, I think we also see that the large deficits that the U.S. Federal government are running are in some ways largely mirrored by very, very good private sector financial positions. In aggregate U.S. households have record levels of assets relative to debt at the end of 2024; in aggregate the financial position of the U.S. equity market has never been better. And so, this is a dynamic where lending to the private sector, whether that is to parts of the residential mortgage market or to the corporate credit market, does have some advantages; where not just are you dealing with arguably a better trend of financial position, but you're just getting less issuance. I think there are a number of factors that could cause the market to cause the difference of yield between the government debt and that private sector debt – that so-called spread – to be narrower than it otherwise would be.Lisa Shalett: Well, that's a pretty interesting and provocative idea because, one of the hypotheses that we laid out in our paper is that perhaps one of the consequences of this extraordinary period of monetary stimulus of financial repression and ultra low rates, of massive regulation of the systemically important banking system, has been the explosion of shadow banks, and the private credit markets. Our thesis is they're a misallocation of capital. Has there been excess risk taking – in that area? And how should we think about that asset class, number one? And, number two, are they increasingly, a source of liquidity and issuance, or are they a drain on the system? Andrew Sheets: This is, kind of, where your discussion of normalization is is so interesting because in aggregate household balance sheets are in very good shape; in aggregate corporate balance sheets are in very good shape. But I do think there's a distinct tail of the market. Lets call it 5 percent of the high yield market, where you really are looking at a corporate capital structure that was designed for for a much lower level of rates. It was designed for maybe a immediately post COVID environment where rates were on the floor and expected to stay there for a long period of time. And so, if we are moving to an environment where Fed funds is at 3 or 4. Or as you mentioned – hey, maybe you could justify a rate even a little bit higher and not be wildly off. Well then, you just...