Displaying items by tag: recession

(New York)

The last couple of trading days have thrown cold water on that bullish trend that sent the market soaring all April. Weak earnings and huge job losses took their toll, and the reality of a slow-slog recovery are weighing on markets. With that in mind, a former Goldman Sachs fund manager, Will Meade, says that stocks are going to fall another 40% from here. Meade argues that this year will be just like the 2000 dotcom bubble: “The Nasdaq in 2000 did a similar bear market bounce as stocks this year — dropped 40%, then bounced 42% off the bottom retracing 61.8% of its drop. It stalled then fell 43%, making a new low four months later,”. Similar to 2000 is that fact that there is additional uncertainty this year created by the election.

FINSUM: This is far from implausible. As the reality of how hard this recovery might be sets in, markets may completely abandon their exuberance.

(New York)

The job losses keep coming week over week. Thursday morning has become a repetitive and gloomy event as millions of job losses hit the tape when weekly jobless claims are released. This morning the figure was 3.3m. That number means the total figure is now over 30m jobs lost in the last six weeks. The fastest drop in history by a gigantic margin. What is even more troubling is that the data underrepresents the true figure, as call centers have been unable to cope with the demand and thus have been underreporting true figures.

FINSUM: The job loss figures are absolutely staggering. California is paying $1bn in jobless insurance per day. We think the market is underestimating how deep of a recession this hit to consumer spending might represent.

(New York)

One of the most famous hedge fund managers on Wall Street made a bold warning yesterday. Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine Capital, adored by the media, said yesterday that he thinks stocks will retest their previous lows. “People don’t understand the magnitude of... the social unease... that’s going to happen … We’ve lost every single job that we created since the bottom in 2009”.

FINSUM: One thing that seems certain right now is that consumer spending is not going to bounce back to where it was for some time. It is going to take years for all these people to re-enter the workforce and loosen the purse strings. A recession for the rest of the year appears inevitable.

(New York)

A famous contrarian fund manager, Alan Lancz, put out a very interesting quote today. He said that “The next 45 days may just become the most critical period in U.S. financial history”. He argues that the manner in which the US economy is reopened will dictate the direction of the next several years of the recovery. In his view, even the best case scenario is a U-shaped recovery where it will take a long time to get back to where we were. In his words, “The much talked about ‘V’ shaped recovery is no longer in the equation because of the unprecedented combination of negatives with this crisis”.

FINSUM: We can’t help but agree. This lockdown has lasted so long—and will likely continue for a while longer—that we can’t imagine we will be back to February 2020’s economic output level until 2022.

(New York)

New data emerging today is for the first time showing the scale of the devastation that has occurred to the US economy. Industrial production fell 5.4% in March, the worst fall since 1946. Headline retails sales fell a whopping 8.7%. Both data points were worse than economists predicted.

FINSUM: What is really worrying here is that large parts of the US were not even shutdown until the very end of March. This means April’s numbers are likely to be a complete washout. Judging by indexes, this scared markets.