Markets mixed, economic downturn may be “very protracted”

Markets were mixed on Tuesday.

The S&P 500 fell 0.5 percent and the Shanghai Composite fell 0.2 percent but the STOXX Europe 600 jumped 1.7 percent.

While markets have been cheered by recent suggestions of economies reopening, some analysts are advising caution.

Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at TIAA Bank, said that there are “a lot of folks out there saying the downturn is going to be much deeper and probably last longer than many had originally predicted”.

“We’re not gonna see, suddenly, a sudden stop in the economy become a sudden start,” Kerry Craig, a global market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, told CNBC on Tuesday. “It’s gonna be very protracted, it’s gonna come through very slowly and I don’t think that’s very much appreciated by what we’re seeing in the markets.”

Meanwhile, the news on the COVID-19 pandemic remained grim, with the US death toll hitting 58,233 on Tuesday, more than the toll from the Vietnam War.

While the US has the highest death toll from the virus in the world, Italy has the second highest death toll, with another 382 deaths on Tuesday, the highest since Saturday, to bring the total to 27,359.