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Wall Street banks are turning more bullish on US stocks, despite President Donald Trump’s renewed threats of steep tariffs on major trading partners, with most big companies expected to shrug off the turmoil in the upcoming earnings season.
Goldman Sachs strategists this week joined JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Citigroup and Deutsche in lifting their end-of-year target for the S&P 500, believing the index will rally 11 per cent beyond the record high it hit last week.
Goldman said the administration’s shifting tariff policy had generated “large uncertainty”. But it added that the outlook had been buoyed by the “fundamental strength of the largest stocks”, hopes of “earlier and deeper” interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve and investors’ willingness to look beyond any potential weakness during second-quarter earnings season, which kicks off next week.
The emerging optimism represents a major pivot since April, when Wall Street banks slashed their targets for the main US share gauge over growing fears about the fallout from Trump’s trade war. The president’s decision to pause his most punishing tariffs has since sparked a rapid comeback for the S&P 500, which is now up more than 6 per cent this year.
Goldman’s upgrade came on the same day that Trump issued a three-week reprieve for countries to negotiate deals with the US but also threatened steep levies on South Korea, Japan, South Africa and several other trading partners.
Although the White House hinted that the latest proposed tariffs may yet be negotiated lower, the administration’s blitz of trade announcements since early April has clouded the outlook for executives and investors alike, forcing several US companies to scrap entirely or lower their earnings forecasts due to higher expected input costs and retaliatory levies.
Nevertheless, many investors have become inured to Trump’s bombastic tariff threats. Wall Street stocks are largely expected to deliver solid second-quarter results, thanks in part to the resilience of the US economy, where the jobs market remains robust and inflation has fallen this year.
JPMorgan, Citibank and BlackRock are due to kick off proceedings next Tuesday, before technology groups, including Google parent Alphabet and Meta, report their financials at the end of July. During the first-quarter earnings season, investors’ positive take hinged on megacap stocks beating profit expectations and issuing bullish guidance.
“For all the bad news in the past few weeks . . . risk assets have shaken off pretty much all of these concerns so far,” said Max Kettner, chief multi-asset strategist at HSBC, referring to investors’ willingness to buy stocks despite the uncertain policy outlook, Moody’s recent downgrade of the US’s credit rating and “geopolitical jitters” in the Middle East.
Energy stocks are expected to suffer a substantial profit hit from the drop in oil prices this year, while carmakers and consumer staples are tipped to bear the brunt of Trump’s tariffs.
But the outlook is otherwise upbeat, with Citi strategists expecting average year-on-year earnings growth for the S&P 500 index of 4.5 per cent, although the so-called Magnificent Seven megacap tech stocks may account for almost half of that.
Most banks have downgraded their earnings estimates for the second quarter since April, but HSBC’s Kettner said “overall expectations have been slashed too much in our view”, creating “a very low bar to beat”.
The fall in the dollar — down 10 per cent this year so far against a basket of other currencies — is also expected to help. Kettner said that megacap tech stocks derived about 60 per cent of revenues from overseas, making the weak US dollar “a significant tailwind” for earnings.
“We have a general baseline that the earnings season will not be a major negative surprise,” said Christian Mueller-Glissmann, head of global asset allocation research at Goldman.
Of particular interest will be whether companies will shoulder the burden of tariffs themselves — which would eat into profits — or pass it on to consumers and potentially fuel inflation, Mueller-Glissmann added.
“What we’re looking for is always margins,” he said. “If you see any signs that returns on equity are being guided down because of some one-off [tariff] shock, that would certainly be something to be worried about.”
