By Kanishka Singh
(Reuters) – Bond investor and DoubleLine Capital Chief Executive Jeffrey Gundlach said on Tuesday he believes the coronavirus sell-off is not over yet and that the lows stocks hit in March will be surpassed in April due to uncertainty over the outbreak.
“I think we are going to get something that resembles that panicky feeling again during the month of April,” he said in a webcast.
The S&P 500 lost 12.52% in March in its biggest monthly decline since the 16.94% slide of October 2008.
“The low we hit in the middle of March, I would bet that low will get taken out,” he said.
Gundlach said the market is acting “somewhat dysfunctionally” and that projections by banks that the U.S. economy will quickly recover were too optimistic.
“We will get back to a better place, but it’s just not going to bounce back in a V-shape back to January of 2020,” he said.
Gundlach said earlier in March that there was a 90% chance the United States would enter a recession before the end of the year due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Loretta Mester said on Tuesday that U.S. economic data for the first half could be “very bad” due to efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
President Donald Trump and his top healthcare advisers urged Americans to follow strict social distancing measures ahead of a “tough two weeks” that could see at least 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus in the United States.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
