2025-04-17
3 分钟Welcome to Thoughts on the Market.
I'm Andrew Sheetz, head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley.
Today, I'm going to talk about how high uncertainty can be a risk for credit and also an opportunity.
It's Wednesday, April 16th at 9 a.m. in New York.
Markets year-to-date have been dominated by questions of U.S. trade policy.
At the center of this debate is a puzzle.
What exactly the goal of this policy is?
Currently, there are two competing theories of what the U.S. administration is trying to achieve.
In one, aggressive tariffs are a negotiating tactic,
an aggressive opening move designed to be bargained down into something much, much lower for an ultimate deal.
And in the other interpretation, aggressive tariffs are new industrial policy.
Large tariffs, for a long period of time,
are necessary to encourage manufacturers to relocate operations to the U.S. over the long term.
Both of these theories are plausible.
Both have been discussed by senior U.S. administration officials.
But they are also mutually exclusive.
They can't both prevail.
The uncertainty of which of these camps wins out is not new.
Market strength back in early February could be linked to optimism that tariffs would be more of that first negotiating tool.
Weakness in March and April was linked to signs that they would be more permanent.