Corporate lament: Big Oil ate my earnings growth

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Wall Street isn’t expecting much in the way of earnings growth from most major companies in the quarter just ended. The question is whether even those subdued expectations are too high.

Second-quarter results will begin to roll out this week, and nobody’s going to be surprised by the biggest winners or the biggest losers: Energy companies will rake it in, again, at everyone else’s expense. Meanwhile, many banks and brokerages will remain deep in the red as losses continue to mount from the what-were-they-thinking loan practices of the last few years.

In between those extremes, the majority of the other 10 broad industry sectors in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index are expected to post single-digit profit growth, at best, given the U.S. economy’s struggles. After energy, the technology sector appears to have the strongest shot at double-digit growth -- which, if it comes true, may demonstrate that after gasoline, there is no higher priority for many companies and consumers worldwide than shelling out for the latest hardware and software upgrades.

Analysts already have taken a machete to their earnings estimates for the quarter: On April 1, the overall expectation for S&P 500 index operating-profit growth (earnings before one-time gains or losses) was for a decline of 2% in the period compared with a year earlier, according to Thomson Reuters, which compiles the data.

Now the overall S&P 500 estimate is for a drop of 12.4%. Analysts have further slashed their financial-company estimates since April 1, but they’ve also pared back estimates for eight of the other 10 S&P industry sectors. The energy sector, alone, has had its estimates raised, thanks to what we’ve all been paying at the pump and at the thermostat. Big Oil and its allied companies are expected to post a 28% jump in earnings, on average, even better than their 26% first-quarter growth.

Apart from the ravaged financial sector, the outlook also remains dismal for the so-called consumer discretionary sector, which includes home builders, automakers and restaurant chains, among other industries.

With the earnings-growth bar seemingly low for so many companies, it’s easy to imagine some pleasant surprises in second-quarter results (remember: consumers were spending those tax rebate checks in the quarter, just not on houses or cars).

But better-than-expected earnings aren’t worth much if a company’s CEO accompanies them with a downbeat assessment of the near future. And there’s likely to be a lot of caution in the outlook portion of the quarter’s reports, given what $145-a-barrel oil is doing to the global economy.

These days, you have to figure that most of the truly confident CEOs are in the energy business -- and they’re not about to tell us how they really feel.