Silver Bear Cafe

BlackBay’s Schoenberger: Stocks Will Plunge 40 Percent
by Year-End
Dan Weil

A myriad of factors will conspire to send the stock marketing plummeting for the balance of the year, says Todd Schoenberger, managing principal of money manager BlackBay Group.

He sees the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index dropping 40 percent to 815 from 1,358 recently.

“Going forward it's best to be bearish," Schoenberger tells Yahoo.So what’s going to fuel the move?

“You have Europe, where there’s a deep, deep recession,” he says. And Europe is a major customer of China, which already is seeing an economic slowdown.

China’s GDP growth shrank to 8.1 percent in the first quarter from 8.9 percent in last year’s final quarter.

In the United States, “we are running into a brick wall,” Schoenberger says. “The fiscal cliff means higher taxes. We’re not going to have anyone to bail us out, and we’re talking about austerity.”

In addition, earnings growth has decelerated to 3 percent year-on-year from 12 percent a year ago, Schoenberger says. “Where are earnings coming from?”

And finally, the Federal Reserve won’t ease again before the election, he predicts. “This second half is going to be absolute doom and gloom.”

Not everyone agrees with Schoenberger’s negative forecast.

“We still believe in the bull market,” Laszlo Birinyi, president of Birinyi Associates, tells Bloomberg. “I’m just telling people to turn the page to the investments, the things that you can really quantify and put your fingers on. Stick to what truly matters: company fundamentals.”