Michael Burry is best known for predicting the 2008 housing market collapse, and making a killing in the process, but in recent years he’s taken to Twitter to criticize stock valuations, crypto bulls, and overall reckless investor behavior.
In June 2021, the Scion Asset Management chief, who Christian Bale portrayed in the 2015 film The Big Short, called the stock market the “greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things” and warned crypto investors that “the mother of all crashes” was coming.
Since then, the S&P 500 has dropped more than 12%, and the blue-chip index is down 21% over the past six months alone. But Burry warned on Thursday that there could be even more pain ahead.
“Adjusted for inflation, 2022 first-half S&P 500 down 25-26%, and Nasdaq down 34-35%, Bitcoin down 64-65%,” he tweeted. “That was multiple compression. Next up, earnings compression. So, maybe halfway there.”
If Burry is correct, and the S&P 500 has another 25% fall ahead of it, even after logging its worst first-half performance since 1970, the index could drop as low as 2,800 this year.
That’s quite the dip, but it’s still not as bad as what Burry predicted back in May, when he argued the S&P 500 could sink as far as 1,862, based on a historical analysis of past bear markets.
Burry’s consistent predictions of impending economic doom have led some to argue he’s entering boy-who-cried-wolf territory. Elon Musk even called him a “broken clock” in November 2021.
Still, Burry isn’t alone in predicting more downside ahead for stocks. George Ball, chairman of Sanders Morris Harris, a Houston-based investment firm with $4.9 billion in assets under management, told Fortune that he sees the S&P 500 falling to 3,100 this year as the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates in its battle against inflation.
“We do not believe the stock market has bottomed yet, and we see further downside ahead,” Ball said. “The Federal Reserve’s aggressive, but necessary inflation-fighting measures are likely to depress corporate earnings and push stocks lower.”
Like Burry, Ball says the rising cost of borrowing from Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, along with slowing consumer spending, will hurt corporate profits moving forward and send stock prices lower.
Most experts on Wall Street seem to agree with that assessment.
According to a June 27-29 Deutsche Bank survey of more than 475 institutional investors and other market professionals, 72% believe the S&P 500 will hit 3,300 before it rises to 4,500, and 90% now see a U.S. recession by the end of 2023.
