BofA’s Hartnett Says Consumer Stocks Best Bet as S&P 500 Wavers

Consumer stocks are the best buying opportunity in the current environment, according to Bank of America Corp.’s Michael Hartnett, even as a surge in benchmark oil prices to near multi-year highs threatens to fan inflation and dent economic growth.

“Consumer stocks are the ones that have really discounted stagflation,” Hartnett told Bloomberg TV Thursday at the bank’s capital markets conference in Paris. “Affordability, [the] lower income consumer that everyone dislikes at that moment — that’s probably where from a trading perspective the best trading opportunity is.”