RIYADH — The days of easy money and zero interest rates are in the past, Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick told a group of chief financial officers in Riyadh on Tuesday.

“The end of financial repression, zero interest and zero inflation, that era is over. Interest rates will be higher, they will be contested around the world. And the end of the ‘end of history’ – geopolitics is back and will be part of the challenge for decades to come,” Pick said, referring to Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that conflicts between nations and ideologies were a thing of the past with the end of the Cold War.

Suppressed rates and easy monetary policy have been in the rearview mirror since 2022, when – after cutting rates to near zero to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic – the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate by around 500 basis points within 18 years. Monday.

“We had a sugar high of Covid-19 and zero rates so small companies could go public without much of a business plan, and then we had this pretty tough mess for about 18 months when almost nothing was happening,” Pick said of that time. talking about the challenges for listed companies.

“And now it feels like a more normalized cadence. It’s harder to be a public company,” he said on a panel moderated by CNBC’s Sara Eisen at Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative.

The Fed cut its benchmark rate by 50 basis points in September – the first cut since March 2020 – signaling a turning point in the management of the US economy and the outlook for inflation.

In late September reports, strategies from JP Morgan and Fitch Ratings predicted two more interest rate cuts by the end of 2024 and expects such cuts to continue through 2025.

Several Wall Street chief executives seem to disagree, citing expectations of continued inflation.

At an earlier FII conference on Tuesday, guests including the chief executives of Goldman Sachs, Carlyle, Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered and State Street were asked to raise their hands if they thought the Fed would implement two more rate cuts this year. None of the panelists raised their hands.