Bank of America has lowered its 2022 target for the S&P 500 by 900 points, to 3,600, citing its forecast for a recession this year and expectations for a Federal Reserve “pivot” in 2023.
The new year-end target is “the lowest on the Street,” said equity and quant strategists at Bank of America in a BofA Global Research report Thursday. BofA now forecasts a “mild” U.S. recession starting in the second half of 2022, they said.
Other big Wall Street banks have also recently lowered their estimates for the S&P 500 after the stock market was badly bruised in the first half of 2022.
The change came after a scorching-hot inflation reading on Wednesday. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Consumer Price Index rose 9.1% in June, for the fastest pace of inflation in 41 years. Economists at the bank also said the US would enter a recession this year.
“Our previous baseline outlook for the US economy featured a growth recession,” the bank said in a note yesterday, referring to an economic downturn where output continues to grow, but below estimates. The bank said it now expects five quarters of negative growth, from the first quarter of this year, through the first quarter of 2023.
They added that the Federal Reserve will pause its rate hiking cycle in the first half of next year, and begin cutting rates by the second half and into the first half of 2024.
The analysis comes as the Labor Department reported Wednesday that the consumer price index was up 9.1 percent over last June, the highest increase in four decades.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point last month in an attempt to cool off the economy and slow price increases, the largest increase since the 1990s. Some economists have expressed worries that these efforts may lead to a recession.
The report states that the Bank of America economists expect a mild recession to begin in the second half of 2022, with real gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the value of the economy’s goods and services adjusted for inflation, declining 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of the year.
The forecast then predicts a 1 percent real GDP increase in 2023.
Previously, Bank of America predicted that spending would remain robust in the face of inflation, and that economic woes could be explained by continued fluctuations as the U.S. emerged from the pandemic. “Digging deeper, we don’t see cause for alarm here,” wrote the team in a report released in late May that focused on the idea that the state of the economy could be explained by consumers shifting away from spending on goods to spending on services.
“Perhaps most worrisome to us is the trend in services spending,” the team wrote in Wednesday’s note, adding that new data show less momentum than expected. “Softer spending on goods has been part of our outlook for some time, but weakness in services was a surprise.”
Owing to the greater-than-expected impact of inflation on consumer behavior, the team wrote on Wednesday that it expects the Fed to continue to impose aggressive interest rate hikes throughout this year.
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