Abby Joseph Cohen Says New Bull Market Has Begun

Stocks entered a new bull market in March, and the S&P 500 could rise an additional 10% by the end of the year, Abby Joseph Cohen, senior investment strategist at Goldman Sachs, said on CNBC.

Cohen said GDP and industrial production figures will indicate that the recession is over. However, the labor market will not improve for some time to come, she said. In fact, Goldman has raised its forecast for GDP growth for the rest of the year from 1% to 3%, citing a need to replenish low inventories.

“Many companies trying to be very cautious over last year really squeezed inventories down to levels that are unsustainable,” Cohen said. “Even without any notable improvement in current demand, companies just need to have more stuff in the back room to get their business done.”

Then, on Friday, the unemployment report came out showing that 247,000 jobs were cut in July, putting unemployment at 9.4%, lower than the 350,000 job losses and 9.6% unemployment rate economists had predicted.

In another report in Fortune, economist Dennis Gartman concurred that a recovery is just getting started, but he said it began at the end of July.

Gartman said that after 35 years of tracking the economy, he pays attention to only a few indicators, most notably jobless claims, which fell to 584,000 for the week ended July 25, down from 658,000 in the week ended March 7.

Next, he looks at a ratio of current to lagging economic indicators on industrial production, income and employment from The Conference Board. If the figures for the current numbers are increasing at a faster rate than the lagging numbers, Gartman said, that indicates that growth is at hand.

However, he warned that economic news could continue to be negative until October, pointing out that “the news is horrible at the bottom of a recession.”

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