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A screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on June 13. The S&P 500 went into bear-market territory as investors continued to react to inflation and Fed tightening. Photo: EPA-EFE

Nearly all of Wall Street – and the Fed – botched calls for 2022 as stocks, Treasuries, bitcoin slump in tandem

  • Just about everyone on Wall Street have got it wrong this year as the Ukraine war, Fed lift-off and China lockdowns sent assets spiralling
  • The S&P 500 has lost 23 per cent while bitcoin shed more than half its value in 2022
Stocks
So far 2022 has been a year where just about everyone on Wall Street got it wrong. As did the Fed and a cadre of global central banks.

Back in December, strategists at the world’s top investment firms like JPMorgan Chase predicted the S&P 500 would gain 5 per cen in 2022. Economists saw the US 10-year Treasury yield hitting 2 per cent on average by the year’s end. And even Goldman Sachs lent credibility to the claims bitcoin was on track to hit US$100,000.

Yet six months later, an unprecedented confluence of shocks has ended one the most powerful equity bull markets and sent safe-haven government bonds and other assets spiraling. The S&P 500 is down 23 per cent, 10-year rates stand at 3.23 per cent and bitcoin has shed more than half its value.

The market has quickly turned from “buy everything” to “sell everything,” with the multi-year “there is no alternative” (TINA) phenomena in equities now gone. Unforeseen events including the Russia-Ukraine war have contributed to the highest consumer prices in 40 years. As a result, ultra-low interest rates and monetary stimulus – essentially the foundation of the post-pandemic rally – have evaporated as the Federal Reserve and its counterparts have sought to quell inflation.

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“This is absolutely the end of TINA for the foreseeable future” said James Athey, investment director in London at abrdn, a UK asset management firm. “With 8 per cent inflation, not much is attractive on a real basis.”

Even Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman, did not see the turbulence that was coming from inflation. He expected price gains to decline to levels closer to the Fed’s longer-run goal of 2 per cent by the end of 2022. But now bond markets are flashing recession signals as the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes pose a risk to the economy’s growth.

“This time last year, the Fed were themselves still expecting [rates] to be floored near zero at this point,” said Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid. In less than half a year, that needle now points to 3.5 per cent by 2022’s end.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell waits to deliver remarks at the Conference on the International Roles of the US dollar on June 17 in Washington. Photo: AFP

Even with the sharp declines, however, market gurus are keeping faith stocks will make a recovery by the end of the year.

Oppenheimer’s John Stoltzfus still sees the S&P 500 ending 2022 at 5,330 points, requiring a 45 per cent rally in the next six months. A handful of others, including JPMorgan and Credit Suisse, have targets that require the index to rally at least 30 per cent to be met. Wall Street strategists, on average, see the S&P 500 gaining 22 per cent from Friday’s level in the latest Bloomberg survey.

To be sure, it’s anyone’s guess on when Russia’s war in Ukraine will end or the supply chain bottlenecks due to China’s stringent Covid policies will ease, lifting price pressures in addition to the Fed’s policy tightening.

For Max Kettner, chief multi-asset strategist at HSBC Global Research, equities have not fully priced in a recession relative to other asset classes. “All in all, this means there is further weakness for risk assets in store over the summer months.”

02:52

Ordinary Russians feel economic pain of Western sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine invasion

Ordinary Russians feel economic pain of Western sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine invasion

The benchmark S&P 500 fell 51 per cent from peak to trough between 2000 and 2002, and by 58 per cent during the period of the global financial crisis.

Likewise, Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson, one of the few bearish voices in December, said the market’s more than 20 per cent drop still does not fully reflect the risks to corporate earnings.

From the look of it, all one can do is stash cash under the mattress while gold and US Treasuries, arguably two of the safest financial assets, also sinking.

Stocks and bonds together are on track for their worst quarter ever. Meanwhile, credit markets have also taken a battering.

So far this year the worldwide pool of the safest corporate debt has lost more than US$900 billion, marking its worst first-half of a year on record, according to Bloomberg data. Measures of corporate credit risk are also spiking, with default-swaps insuring the debt of Europe’s high-grade firms reaching the highest since April 2020.

02:08

Beijing’s tentative reopening disrupted by new Covid outbreak linked to nightclub in Chinese capital

Beijing’s tentative reopening disrupted by new Covid outbreak linked to nightclub in Chinese capital

Perhaps no other asset class has seen as wild of swings in 2022 as cryptocurrencies. For all the calls for bitcoin to hit US$100,000 earlier this year and claims of it being an inflation hedge, the market for digital assets has been in a downward spiral.

Bitcoin has over lost two-thirds of its value since it touched a high of nearly US$70,000 in November. Arguments the world’s largest cryptocurrency was akin to gold and an independent store of value have gone quiet. Meanwhile, the crypto ecosystem of miners, traders and exchanges has been under growing scrutiny amid layoffs, freezes on withdrawals and liquidity problems.

It’s still not easy to get anything right in this market. There have been big rallies and big drawdowns, painting a bleak picture. But HSBC’s Kettner said this year’s trigger has been obvious.

“Just like investors were obsessed with the idea of ‘transitory inflation’ last year, the obsession of 2022 so far has been ‘peak inflation,’” he said. Inflation hasn’t turned out to be transitory, nor has it peaked yet. As such, “the last few days have been brutal,” Kettner added.

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