(Photos: Shutterstock; compilation: Chris Nicholls/ALM)
The stats border on the ridiculous. On the eve of an earnings season nobody has a clue about, the S&P 500 notches its best week in 46 years. About $4 trillion has been added to share prices, a few weeks after $10 trillion was sheared off.
Does it make any sense? To skeptical Wall Street veterans, the answer is obvious: no.
While stimulus is flowing and the curve may be flattening, investors are bidding up stocks at a time unemployment may already be 15%, with economists forecasting one of the biggest contractions ever. Only a fool buys equities trading at 40 times the worst estimates for this year's profits.
To all that, a single rebuttal exists. That in the absence of clarity, investors have no choice but to write this year off entirely. No matter how bad the recession gets, markets look forward — relentlessly. Whatever horrors the world is yet to endure investors will focus on the recovery.
"It's almost as if nobody is even going to worry about 2020," said Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at TIAA. "If the earnings are so bad that it looks like the company won't be able to survive, that matters. But for most companies, investors have to look past 2020 because nobody knows what's going to happen."
To be sure, it takes a radical bull case to ignore everything going on now. Companies may be suffering lasting structural damage to their earnings power.
Surely equities are worth less in a recession, objectors say, and who knows how long it will take to rebuild the economy?
That's why Wall Street has been heaping mud on the S&P 500's 25% jump since March 23, saying it's a bear-market bounce.
But it's the only viable way to explain a week in which the Nasdaq 100 ended just a couple big days away from erasing its 2020 decline.
While there's no historical parallel for what's going on today, the experience of individual companies that survived sudden blows to their profits may be relevant.
It's a deeply inexact model, prone to survivorship bias, since when faced with existential threats, many companies don't make it. But a few examples, particularly of industrial megacaps who had profits for entire years gutted by giant fines, may hold clues for the S&P 500 should the recession prove brief.
Consider BP PLC. After the oil explorer and producer coughed up a record $20.8 billion in 2015 to pay for damages caused by an oil spill, earnings per share dropped roughly 50% for two years straight before tripling in 2017. Its stock price came back even faster. After falling 14% in 2015, shares soared 44% in 2016 for the best year since 1993.
Similarly, when Volkswagen AG was forced to set aside tens of billions of dollars for lawsuits and damages after an emissions scandal dubbed "Dieselgate," it didn't take long for a rebound to materialize. Shares plunged 18% in 2018, then surged 25% in 2019.
A more sobering model — though possibly a more pertinent one — is financial institutions in the 2008 crisis. While the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is the highest profile, more than 400 banks failed by 2011, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
But massive bail-outs helped others survive. After plummeting 50% in 2008 and seeing a fifth of its members removed, the KBW Bank Index fell less than 4% in 2009 before jumping 22% in 2010. By the end of that year, the gauge was up 180% from its lows.
