Goldman Sachs warns that U.S. stocks could turn into a bear market, and BlackRock downgrades its rating on U.S. stocks

As Trump launches his trade war, warnings from Wall Street strategists are mounting, signalling a bleak outlook for stocks. On Monday, strategists Jean Boivin and Wei Li of BlackRock & Co. downgraded their three-month outlook for U.S. stocks from overweight to neutral, saying they expect "more pressure on risk assets in the near term given the significant escalation in global trade tensions." Meanwhile, the strategy team at Goldman Sachs Group, which includes strategists such as Peter Oppenheimer, said the stock market sell-off is likely to morph into a longer-lasting cyclical bear market as recession risks increase. Cyclical bear markets typically last about two years and take five years to rebound to the starting point. For now, they see the U.S. stock sell-off as an event-driven bear market. In both bear markets, they say, stocks tend to fall by an average of 30 per cent but "have different durations, with shorter event-driven downturns and faster recoveries".