In what Bank of America is already calling "The Crash of 2020," investors ran for exits the most on record as coronavirus risks slammed a wide range of assets.
A month of intense volatility and pronounced sell-offs wiped out as much as $24 trillion in global stock market cap from equities' peak to their last lowest level, Bank of America analysts detailed in a Thursday note. Risk assets and expensive bonds were exchanged for cash as banks called for near-term economic recession and coronavirus cases continued to spike across the US.
The "feral" activity on Wall Street drove several record capital flows through the week ended March 19, the team led by Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Securities, said. Investors primarily sold off bonds of all grades to stockpile cash, but most assets saw historic exit activity as Americans braced for an economic slowdown.
Here are the seven records set during the week that ended March 19, according to Bank of America.
Read more: Goldman Sachs pinpointed these 15 must-own stocks it says are best positioned to weather an inevitable coronavirus recessionGold saw its fifth-largest outflow ever at $2.5 billion over the week, while cash saw its fourth-biggest inflow over the week at $95.7 billion, Bank of America added.
The global lockdown "on movement, people, goods, services" is unprecedented and will further slow economic activity as countries rush to contain the coronavirus outbreak, the analysts wrote. Bank of America announced Thursday it believes the US has already plunged into a recession, adding that second-quarter GDP is estimated to slump the most since World War II. The government's policy response will determine whether the downturn will last into the second half of the year, bank economist Michelle Meyer wrote in the Thursday note.
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