Beth Williams, Columnist

Lessons From a Quarter We'd Like to Forget

Profits overall are dropping and the outlook is only getting worse. But just how bad is it? Bloomberg Opinion columnists offer their takeaways.

May 15, 2020 at 11:00 AM UTC

By Beth Williams

Beth Williams is a managing editor with Bloomberg Opinion. She has also worked at Bloomberg News as an editor and reporter covering M&A, markets, companies, finance and government.

The bad place.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America

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With first-quarter earnings mostly in the books, investors have now gotten their first detailed glimpse of how the coronavirus pandemic has affected profits in corporate America. To no one’s surprise, the results as a whole weren’t good: Earnings fell about 14% from a year earlier for members of the S&P 500 Index, according to DataTrek Research.

Wall Street analysts expect things to get worse before they get better, with earnings forecast to plunge about 41% in the second quarter, decline 24% in the third quarter and drop 11% in the final three months of the year. Add them up and Wall Street forecasts a 20% tumble for the year to $127 a share. Coming into 2020, the consensus was that members of the S&P 500 would produce earnings of about $175 a share.