On this preview episode of the new Morgan Stanley podcast "Thoughts on the Market", Chief Investment Officer Mike Wilson shares a readout on the firm’s proprietary Business Conditions Index. Are the data softening more than investors realize?

In the future, we’ll all still need a place to live. But as rents continue to rise and the housing market changes, we might need to adjust our vision of home. Instead of living in a tiny, expensive apartment or funneling our savings into a down payment for a single-family home, we might choose to live together for the sake of space, money, and, above all else, community. This type of housing model, known as co-living, has existed throughout history, but new iterations of co-living are...

Have you ever tasted a habanada pepper? An upstate abundance potato? A Robin’s Koginut squash? These new vegetable breeds, all created by Row Seven Seed Company, are bursting with new flavors that come straight from the earth. But what about those wasabi seaweed snacks? Or something like beer chips? Or crazy ice cream flavors that seem to come from natural sources but are most-likely made in a lab? The flavor industry is worth billions of dollars, but with new technology, our changing...

As you walk down the street, sit in your office, or even make yourself a cup of coffee, take a look around and consider what everything is made of. ​More often than not, the answer will be: plastic. Our world is made of plastic. It’s one of the most affordable, versatile and indestructible materials we have. But the very properties that make plastic perfect for so much have also made it problematic. Most of that plastic is still here, and it will be for hundreds of years. But in the future,...

You many have imagined a future of transit where we all blast off to work strapped into personal jetpacks or shuttle our kids to and from school in flying cars. But the future is now, and the innovative transportation systems of today are surprising in their own right. The best among them are reimagining infrastructure design and project funding to get people moving across town and around the globe.  In this second episode of the new season of the Ideas podcast, we head to a place where the...

Rummaging through your pockets in search of change and crumpled bills to pay for your morning coffee may still feel routine, but in some parts of the world, this familiar scene is just a memory. The cashless economy is already starting to take shape, and as we continue to create innovative ways to exchange money without pulling out our wallets, cash might become a thing of the past. And while some countries struggle with questions of fairness and inclusivity as governments and businesses...

Ever wonder what your life might be like 5, 10, 20 years from now? This season, we’re taking you around the globe -- everywhere from Tanzania to Sweden to Japan -- to catch a glimpse of what the future might hold. Because the future ​is ​happening somewhere. It’s just a matter of knowing where to find it. New season starts the first week of March.

Season four of the Ideas Podcast will be starting soon, but in the meantime, we’re kicking things off with a bonus episode in honor of Climate Week NYC: an annual summit where scientists, government officials, and CEOs come together to showcase innovations, programs, and policies that are leading the fight against climate change. But for many key players in today’s financial world, the future of climate action isn’t relegated to one week. At Morgan Stanley, there is a whole team of...

The word “sports” may conjure images of athletes barreling down a football field or burying a three-pointer, but the latest stadium-rousing athletes rarely if ever have to leave their chairs. Welcome to the world of professional video-gaming, or eSports. Around the world, eSports is looking more and more like any big-league sport, complete with sponsorships, merchandising, and arenas full of fans. And now, eSports is on track to become a multibillion-dollar industry. In this episode of the...

After long careers and years of saving, many of today’s retirees have decided not to set sail on an exotic cruise or spend their days on the golf course. They’re changing what it means to retire by re-entering the workforce—and creating an entirely new market in the process. In this episode of the Ideas podcast, we look at the tech startups, nonprofits, and even the baby boomers themselves who are shaping the newly retired market. Steve Records, the Vice President of Field Operations at...

For the past 40 years, Major League Baseball’s off-season has been dominated by a frenzied bidding war to sign available free agents. But this year, everything changed—the free-agent market froze. For months, almost none of the 200 free agents were signed. So what happened? And what does the market shift mean for the future of America’s pastime? This season on the Ideas Podcast, we’ve been exploring unexpected markets. In this episode, we’ll look at what happens when a seemingly healthy...

Virtual reality is popping up in almost every industry, doing things that were once unimaginable. How did it grow from the stuff of Sci-Fi into a real world revolution? As with so many things, it began with a language.  In this episode of the Ideas podcast, we explore the virtual future by looking at one of the earliest VR worlds. Bryan Carter, a professor at the University of Arizona, guides us on a tour of Virtual Harlem, an early VR world that allowed his students to walk the streets of...

Tech promised us more productivity and better lives via perpetual connectivity. Now, it seems impossible to stop looking at our screens. Can we disrupt distraction?  In this episode of the Ideas podcast, we’re diving deep into the solutions-to-digital-distraction market. We talk to Suze Yalof-Schwartz, the founder of Unplug, a meditation app that helps people, well, unplug from technology by plugging in. Manoush Zomorodi, a technology journalist, shows us that the way we interact with our...

As our lives become more digital, our money is becoming increasingly digital too. There are more than a thousand cryptocurrencies floating around and new ones seem to launch every day. But is this new form of money, one that only exists online, even a currency? What exactly gives cryptocurrencies value? In this episode of the Ideas podcast, we head to the Berkshires to see what a local currency, the BerkShare, can teach us about the value of alternative currencies. We speak with the creator...

Get ready, the new season of the Morgan Stanley Ideas Podcast is almost here! This time around we’re making sense of a slew of surprising markets: cryptocurrency, virtual reality, baseball free agency, and many more. New episodes start in June!

On this special episode of the podcast we visit an exciting new exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Along the way we talk with Art Historian Diana Gisolfi of the Pratt Institute, and with Morgan Stanley’s Ferdousi Islam, an employee guide for company clients and employees at the exhibition, to look at the value of art in all its aspects, not only the monetary. Eight years in the making, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer is sponsored by Morgan Stanley and open to the...

A rapid shift in the auto industry is coming. Electric vehicles, the long-anticipated cars of the future, are poised to dominate global markets in the next few decades. What impact will they have on how we live our lives? In this episode of the Ideas podcast, we wonder what an electric-car-powered future will look like. Will the internal combustion vehicle go the way of the horse and buggy? Will it mean the revival of the drive-in theater? Or the drive-in home? We speak with urban designer...

We know to make sure our heirs can access our online bank accounts, but what about the rest of our digital selves? As more and more meaningful parts of our lives enter the virtual world, how do we value the assets we leave behind online? What are they worth and to whom? In this episode of the Ideas podcast, we wonder: What’s a good way to pass on 10,000 photos from all those family vacations? Does a viral social media account have real-world value after you die? Could our endless streams of...

Finding the rare unicorn startup that both disrupts an entire industry and changes the world for the better has been the mission for Nancy Pfund of DBL Partners. These double bottom line businesses are changing the way many are thinking about sustainability. In this episode of the podcast we learn what Nancy values in these companies, visit a transformative soap factory in a struggling Chicago community, and hear from Hilary Irby, Morgan Stanley’s co-head of Global Sustainable Finance, about...

When businessman Ron Harrington turned his attention and considerable fortune toward philanthropy he, like many others, confronted the issue of how to make the biggest impact. In this episode we explore the challenges of effective philanthropy, hear stories from Bill and Melinda Gates, talk about the importance of failure, discuss the solution the Harrington project is putting in place and get some tips from Melanie Schnoll-Begun of Morgan Stanley Philanthropy Management. For further...

Can consumers get the same quick turnaround on new styles from the sneaker industry that they’ve come to expect for sportswear? This episode, we travel from a sneakerhead haven on New York’s Lower East Side to a state of the art robotics workshop outside Atlanta. Along the way we talk with Jay Sole, Morgan Stanley’s Branded Apparel and Footwear Analyst, about the future of the sneaker industry.

Can a building be great for the environment, great for the people inside, great for the bottom line and even great for the economy? In this episode, we visit Seattle's Bullitt Center, one of the greenest commercial buildings in the world. Morgan Stanley analyst Faty Dembele shares her research on the opportunities and impacts of sustainable building solutions, while University of Washington researcher Heather Burpee explains what it takes to design a building that goes far beyond a LEED...

You might assume that building great teams only requires hiring smart people who get along and can work toward a common goal, but that isn’t necessarily what the data tells us. Carnegie Mellon professor Anita Williams-Woolley shares her research on how to maximize collective intelligence, or the type of intelligence that emerges from effective collaboration. We learn about the importance of having cognitive diversity on a team, and the critical step of creating the right environment for such...

Smart decision-making takes more than intelligent people and good data. The theories of behavioral economics inform how businesses, and the rest of us, can try to avoid the irrational responses that may work against our best interests.

This week we're focusing on what may be a blind spot in all the excitement over autonomous vehicles: the future of car insurance. How will it work if there are no actual drivers to insure? We get a glimpse of the not-too-distant future by traveling to Mcity, a leading self-driving car test site at the University of Michigan and we hear from Jon Hocking, who covers the auto insurance industry for Morgan Stanley Research, as well as Hilary Rowen, a legal insurance expert who keeps close track...