The World You Knew Is Never Coming Back with Morgan Stanley’s Michael Zezas
June 19, 2026
AI Summary
5 min read“The world you knew is never coming back.” That is not a slogan from Morgan Stanley’s Michael Zezas. It is the core conviction he developed watching the 2016 election and the years that followed, and it has shaped how one of Wall Street’s largest research departments thinks about everything from tariffs to AI infrastructure. Zezas joined The Compound and Friends to explain how he went from covering municipal bonds to becoming a deputy head of global research, why policy continuity matters more than election noise, and why the multipolar world is not a risk to hedge but a structural reality to invest around.
From Munis to Macro: The Accidental Policy Expert
Zezas did not plan to become a macro strategist. He started at Morgan Stanley covering municipal credit, a niche that forced him to become a de facto Washington analyst after the 2008 financial crisis. When the monoline insurers collapsed, every muni bond suddenly needed fundamental credit analysis, and that meant understanding tax policy, healthcare policy, and sovereign debt dynamics. “I sort of adopted this approach as a muni strategist that was trying to be somewhat different than my peers,” he said. “Instead of calculating carry and roll down at every tenor, let's look at this from a macro perspective.” When Donald Trump won in 2016, the firm tapped him to answer client questions on a multi-asset basis. The quest
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Pre-Show Banter & Guest Introduction** - The hosts and guest Michael Zezas (Morgan Stanley) chat about movies, name pronunciation, and career background before the formal start.
- 2 (06:54) **The Accidental Policy Expert: From Munis to Macro** - Zezas explains how covering municipal bonds during the financial crisis naturally led to analyzing public policy and, after Trump's 2016 win, to leading U.S. Public Policy Research.
- 3 (11:47) **Navigating the Uncharted Trump Era** - How Morgan Stanley’s research culture helped clients when the White House became a direct market participant, and the realization that the old normal was gone.
- 4 (15:47) **The Death of the Old Washington Consensus** - Zezas diagnoses the shift in voter preferences that broke the post-1980s consensus on free trade, multilateralism, and limited government.
- 5 (18:00) **The Multipolar World Thesis: A Six-Year Track Record** - From 2020, Morgan Stanley’s core call: a regime change driven by voter shifts, with globalization’s best days behind us and geopolitical fragility rising.
- 6 (20:51) **Intel: The Poster Child for Policy-Driven Capex** - Zezas uses Intel’s transformation from a ridiculed onshoring bet to a government-backed AI beneficiary as the perfect example of the new regime.
- 7 (23:29) **The Hard Problem: Connecting Policy to Investing** - Even if you nail the policy outcome, you must contextualize it within other variables (AI earnings, the Fed) to get the market call right.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
On episode 247 of The Compound and Friends, Michael Batnick and Downtown Josh Brown are joined by Michael Zezas, Deputy Global Head of Research at Morgan Stanley, to discuss: AI capex, data centers, productivity gains, prediction markets, the 2026 midterms, the Fed, enterprise software, and why policy calls are so difficult to translate directly into investment outcomes.
This episode is sponsored by Public and Vanguard.
- To learn more about Public, visit https://public.com/Compound.
- To learn more about Vanguard bonds, visit https://vanguard.com/audio.
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Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management.
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