Financial safety

Jeffrey Gundlach: The US stock market ‘will get crushed’ in the next recession

Influential bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach, the CEO of $150 billion DoubleLine Capital, sees a scenario where U.S. stocks get crushed in the next recession — and likely won't recover for quite some time to come.

Even with Wall Street benchmarks just days removed from new record highs, the bearish investor declared that “the pattern of the United States outperforming the rest the world has already come to an end.”

In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance, Gundlach noted that 2019 was one of the "easiest" years ever for investors in "just about anything...Just throw a dart, and you're up 15-20%, not just the United States, but global stocks as well."

He added that investors should consider a pattern he highlights in his "chart of the year,” which divides the world into four regions — the United States, Japan, Europe, and Emerging Markets — and looks at the major stock market indices.

And what that shows is a pattern where the Nikkei 225 (^N225), the Euro Stoxx 50 Index, and the MSCI Emerging Markets index all peaked before a recession — but never recovered to pre-recession levels. The same fate might befall the S&P 500 Index (^GSPC) in the U.S., according to Gundlach.