The Fed, Football and the Price of Ambiguity

Andrew Sheets (0:00)

Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Global Head of Fixed Income Research at Morgan Stanley. Today, what American football can teach us about the value of ambiguity. It's Thursday, September 10th at 2 p.m. in London.

I really like this time of year. It's a little cooler outside. There's the excitement in the air of a start of a million new school years, and of course, it's finally American football season. Of the top 100 US television telecasts in 2025, 90 were football games. In an increasingly divided world, with an increasingly fragmented ecosystem for content, this unanimity is stunning. While many factors explain football's popularity, one that I've come to appreciate more with time is its strategic complexity, especially the value of ambiguity. Not tipping, whether it's a run or a pass, disguising weather and where you're going to blitz. Coaches work hard to keep their options open until the last possible moment. And as we enter September, this strategy is not just confined to football. Take the Fed. Markets are pricing roughly two-thirds chance of a rate hike next week, about the same chance that an NFL team passes on second and seventh. Part of that uncertainty comes from exactly how you parse Fed Chair Warsh's comments at Jackson Hole. Chair Warsh said the Fed needs to be confident that underlying inflation is moving towards its objective quote clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, it has quote work to do. This was generally interpreted as a move closer to raising rates. But was it? What is sufficient speed? What counts as underlying inflation? And what does work to do actually mean?

After all, if inflation is better in the second half of the year, as our economists expect, this framing could just as easily justify no action. We forecast the Fed to stay on hold next week. It is, admittedly, a close call. Then there's ambiguity in AI financing. The numbers here are enormous. Morgan Stanley analysts forecast more than $1.3 trillion of spending among the six largest hyperscalers in 2027, a 60% increase from the record-setting levels of this year. But how all this gets financed? That's less certain. There's an increasingly rich menu of options for financing across public and private markets, from investment-grade bonds to asset-backed securities, from direct financing to guarantees. The spending seems likely, but what form it takes and how much it impacts other markets is more ambiguous. My colleagues Matthew Hornbach and Vichy Tirupattur discussed some of these ambiguities and their potential effect on treasury yields earlier this week.

Finally, ambiguity clouds the energy market. Some analysts are optimistic that oil flows are finally normalizing in the Strait of Hormuz. We are not. Coupled with major disruptions to Russian refining capacity, we've now raised our fourth quarter forecast to $100 per barrel for Brent Oil and 88 euros per megawatt hour for European natural gas.

Across these three themes, some of this ambiguity is intentional. Some simply reflects a wide range of possible outcomes. In football and in markets, keeping your options open can be valuable when you're calling the plays, but it's less attractive when you're being asked to price them.

That for us is the issue. There is plenty of uncertainty. We're not sure investors are being paid enough for it.

A close call September Fed meeting, adverse seasonality and very low levels of expected volatility leave us positioned for higher volatility across macro markets and cautious on mortgage-backed securities. In credit, we think all of this issuance is a question of price, not capacity. We continue to expect record investment grade supply this year with wider spreads as a release valve and prefer collateral-backed assets over unsecured corporates.

And with oil a risk to both stocks and bonds, our US equity strategists think that energy equities offer an attractive hedge.

Ambiguity has value. But when the range of outcomes is wide and the price of uncertainty is low, we think investors should demand more compensation for it. Thank you, as always, for your time. If you find Thoughts on the Market useful, let us know by leaving a review wherever you listen, and also tell a friend or colleague about us today.

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