BMO’s Barclay sees capital markets’ ‘robust phase nears end’

Bloomberg

The head of Bank of Montreal’s (BMO) investment-banking and markets business said capital markets are at the “end of the robust phase” that powered them through the pandemic and are shifting towards a more uncertain future.
Capital markets have been in a boom period marked by heightened merger activity, strong equity markets, low interest rates and subdued fears among investors, BMO Capital Markets Chief Executive Officer Dan Barclay said in an interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California.
The conversations among market participants now are shifting to the risks ahead,
he said.
“We’re in a transition period,” Barclay said in an
interview with Bloomberg Television. “It feels, over the last couple of weeks, that people are starting to reevaluate whether the future is simple and clean, or if we’ve actually got some headwinds coming our way, whether that’s inflation, whether that’s commodity prices, whether it’s the pace of the economic recovery.”
Barclay said inflation — whether it will be transitory
or persistent — is the biggest
unknown.