Credit Spread Outlook

Our Chief Fixed Income Strategist Vishy Tirupattur responds to some of the feedback from clients on Morgan Stanley’s 2026 global outlooks.

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Vishy Tirupattur: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I am Vishy Tirupattur, Morgan Stanley’s Chief Fixed Income Strategist. 

Today, I consider the pushback we've received on our 2026 outlooks – distilling the themes that drew the most debate and our responses to the debates. 

It’s Tuesday, Dec 16th at 3:30pm in New York. 

It's been a few weeks [since] we published our 2026 outlooks for the global economy and markets. We’ve had lots of wide-ranging conversations, much dialogue and debate with our clients across the globe on the key themes that we laid out in our outlook. Feedback has ranged from strong alignment to pointed disagreement, with many nuanced views in between. We welcome this dialogue, especially the pushback, as it forces us to re-examine our assumptions and refine our thinking. 

Our constructive stance on AI and data center-related CapEx, along with the pivotal role we see for the credit market channels, drew notable scrutiny. Our 2026 CapEx projections was anchored by a strong conviction – that demand for compute will far outstrip the supply over the next several years. We remain confident that credit markets across unsecured, structured, and securitized instruments in both public and private domains will be central to the financing of the next wave of AI-driven investments. The crucial point here is that we think this spending will be relatively insensitive to the macro conditions, i.e., the level of interest rates and economic growth. Regarding the level of AI investment, we received a bit of pushback on our economics forecast: Why don’t we forecast even more growth from AI CapEx? From our perspective, that is going to be a multi-year process, so the growth implications also extend over time. 

Our U.S. credit strategists’ forecast for IG bond supply – $2.25 trillion in gross issuance; that’s up 25 percent year-over-year, or $1 trillion in net issuance; that’s 60 percent year-over-year – garnered significant attention. There was some pushback to the volume of the issuance we project. As CapEx growth outpaces revenue and pressures free cash flow, credit becomes a key financing bridge. Importantly, AI is not the sole driver of the surge that we forecast. A pick-up in M&A activity and the resulting increase in acquisition-driven IG supply also will play a key role, in our view. 

We also received pushback on our expectation for modest widening in credit spreads, roughly 15 basis points in investment grade, which we still think will remain near the low end of the historical ranges despite this massive surge in supply. Some clients argued for more widening, but we note that the bulk of the AI-related issuance will come from high-quality – you know AAA-AA rated issuers – which are currently underrepresented in credit markets relative to their equity market weight. Additionally, continued policy easing – two more rate cuts – modest economic re-acceleration, and persistent demand from yield-focused buyers should help to anchor the spreads. 

Our macro strategists’ framing of 2026 as a transition year for global rates – from synchronized tightening to asynchronous normalization as central banks approach equilibrium – was broadly well received, as was their call for government bond yields to remain broadly range-bound. However, their view that markets will price in a dovish tilt to Fed policy sparked considerable debate. While there was broad agreement on the outlook for yield curve steepening, the nature of that steepening – bull steepening or bear steepening – remained a point of contention. 

Outside the U.S., the biggest pushback was to the call on the ECB cutting rates two more times in 2026. Our economists disagreed with President Lagarde – that the disinflationary process has ended. Even with moderate continued euro area growth on German fiscal expansion, but consolidation elsewhere, we still see an output gap that will eventually lead inflation to undershoot the ECB’s 2 percent target. 

We also engaged in lively dialogue and debate on China. The key debate here comes down to a micro versus macro story. Put differently, the market is not the economy and the economy is not the market. Sentiment on investments in China has turned around this year, and our strategists are on board with that view. However, from an economics point of view, we see deflation continuing and fiscal policy from Beijing as a bit too modest to spark near-term reflation. 

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