Profit Pinch Worse Than It Looks With 40% of S&P 500 in Decline

  • That’s worse than the previous profit recession of 2015-2016
  • Single-quarter income slide has been rare in past 80 years
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg
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It may be time to worry about earnings season.

Behind a benign facade, things are getting dicey ahead of the first-quarter reporting season that begins in about a month. Weakening profit growth forms a big plank in the case against U.S. stocks. Anxiety about income growth starred as a central villain in last quarter’s market meltdown.