Friday as a brief moment in time that marked the last local low of 2021

"While COVID is just not going away, at the risk of over-reduction, I'd argue the variable of rising case count hasn't been a significant net negative for a while: the Sun Belt episode of summer 2020 didn't derail the S&P ... the India surge this past spring didn't stand in the way of NIFTY making all-time highs ... and global equity markets haven't been overly bothered in the era of the Delta variant. along that sequence of each successive wave, here's what's seemingly clear: the link between infection and hospitalization/fatality has largely been broken, and that's the big ball for risk assets. that invites a very basic -- and very serious -- question for Omicron: to this point, it appears to be highly transmissible -- but, it's not yet obvious that it's necessarily more lethal than prior variants. what's also not clear is whether the markets will treat ongoing COVID impingements as dis-inflationary (which had been a tailwind for stocks through the prism of yield containment), or perhaps now more inflationary (to the extent it only further complicates getting the supply of goods and labor back online). with the disclaimer that I'm far from an expert in the science of the day, the market had been grinding through a lot of noise and positioning pain before the most recent jolt ... if Omicron doesn't lead to a meaningful jump in hospitalizations/fatalities, I suspect we'll look back at Friday as a brief moment in time that marked the last local low of 2021". (Tony Pasquariello, Goldman Sachs)