(Bloomberg) -- Wall Street forecasters are racing to temper their views on US equities as President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs threaten to upend the global economy.
Oppenheimer & Co.’s John Stoltzfus — the biggest bull among strategists until March — became the latest to slash his year-end target on the S&P 500 Index, to 5,950 points from 7,100. Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson warned the benchmark could sink another 7% to 8% if the Trump administration stays firm on levies.
Strategists at Evercore ISI, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA have also reduced targets in recent days.
In a note to clients Monday, Stoltzfus said uncertainty was “at levels investors find hard to embrace.” This is being combined with “a negative pitch book that seemingly projects negative outcomes to infinity.”
The strategist’s new estimate still forecasts a 17% rebound in the S&P 500, although he said company executives are sounding more cautious. “While our expectations are for cooler heads to prevail in the trade negotiation process, the market’s reaction suggests to us a need to right size expectations in the near term.”
S&P 500 futures sank as much as 5.4% on Monday, putting the benchmark on course for a bear market, after wiping out over $5 trillion in value in just two days last week.
The rout was sparked by Trump imposing the steepest US tariffs in a century, saying he’ll apply a 10% levy on all exports to the US, with higher duties on some 60 nations — including China and the European Union — to counter trade imbalances. China has already pledged retaliatory levies, escalating a trade war and raising fears of a global recession.
Europe’s Stoxx 600 Index tumbled as much as 6.5%, while in Asia, an MSCI gauge plunged over 8% in its worst day since 2008. The CBOE Volatility Index — known as Wall Street’s fear gauge — soared to over 60 points.
“The market does not yet appear to be pricing a recession, and the 2022 experience shows that the market can continue to decline in the face of deteriorating fundamentals even alongside light positioning,” Goldman Sachs strategist David Kostin said. The bank’s economists now see a 45% chance of recession in 12 months.
Fed Help
Investors are looking to the Federal Reserve for signs of faster interest-rate cuts. Trump on Friday also called on the central bank to slash rates, but Chair Jerome Powell said policymakers are likely to remain on hold as they monitor the impact of levies on inflation.
“Investors should be prepared for another 7%-8% potential downside from Friday’s close if there is no line of sight to a less severe trade environment and the Fed remains firmly on hold,” Morgan Stanley’s Wilson wrote in a note. The strategist said a drop of that magnitude would bring the S&P 500 close to its 200-week moving average at 4,700.
Evercore ISI strategist Julian Emanuel cut his year-end target to 5,600 over the weekend, roughly 10% above Friday’s closing level of 5,074. His previous target of 6,800 was among the highest on Wall Street, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Emanuel also lowered his estimate for the S&P 500’s per-share earnings in 2025 and 2026 to $255 and $272, respectively.
“Remaking 80 years of economic, geopolitical and domestic governmental order, post WWII bedrocks — in 80 days – is messy business,” Emanuel wrote in a note. “Doing it with the ‘sledgehammer’ of a larger tariff than 1930’s Smoot-Hawley, was bound to cause turmoil.”
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