Congratulations are in order: The Trump administration just catalyzed the largest decline in a broad measure of fund manager sentiment since the onset of the worst global health crisis in a century.

That’s the kind of accomplishment reserved for singularly divisive, prodigiously erratic figures like Donald Trump who, thank God, only come along once every so often.

The figure below, from the March installment of BofA’s global fund manager poll, shows a 2.6ppt MoM plunge in an aggregated metric which incorporates growth expectations, stock allocations and cash levels.

The drop looks dramatic enough when plotted as a series. If you were to plot it as a MoM change bar chart, you’d see the most pronounced one-month plunge since March of 2020, when the global economy quite literally shut down in the face of a plague.

That measure of fund manager sentiment now sits at a seven-month low, and in addition to being the largest MoM decline since COVID, the drop from February counted as the seventh-largest in a quarter century. The only bigger declines occurred during the GFC, the eurozone debt crisis, S&P’s landmark decision to downgrade America’s credit rating and the pandemic.

(In private, and if he were aware of the poll, this would probably be a perverse point of pride for Trump. (“Think of it: People haven’t been this scared since bleach injections!”)

In fairness — and as is clear from the chart — sentiment’s “nowhere near extreme bear” territory in absolute terms, as BofA’s Michael Hartnett was keen to point out.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the rapidity of the deterioration. The figure below shows the MoM change in the net share of survey panelists who expect the global economy to weaken over the next year.

Excluding the pandemic, March of 2025 stands out for the single worst MoM decline in global growth expectations on record. That series goes back 31 years.

Nearly two thirds of fund managers now expect a weaker global economy this year.

For reference, 171 PMs participated in this month’s poll. They manage nearly half a trillion in AUM between them.