Stock Gains Signal Omicron Threat to Ease, Westwood’s Alpert Says

(Bloomberg) -- Investor support for stocks is showing that the omicron coronavirus variant and inflation pressures are unlikely to devastate the market in 2022, said Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital.

“Omicron is turning out to not be a huge threat,” he told Bloomberg Television's Surveillance Monday. “It's going to cause enormous disruption in leisure, hospitality and transportation over the first quarter. But at the end of the day, I think the market is rallying because there is this perception that there are not going to be these economic lockdowns that resulted from the first several waves of the virus.”

Inflation, another big concern for many forecasters, “is going to come down for a bunch of different reasons,” Alpert said. The consumer price index, a widely followed gauge, rose in November at the fastest annual pace in almost 40 years.

“At the end of this quarter, supply chain backups and logistic problems are going to look like something that has been resolved for a long time,” Alpert said. “ The pandemic era of relief to consumers that caused the enormous spike in consumer demand is already petering out. We're going to see quite a bit of contraction in inflationary pressures.”

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