Value stocks are often the first to recover after recessions and bear markets end. They performed well in the 2002-2005 period and in 2009 immediately after the Great Recession.

Early last autumn there was a brief period when it looked like the leadership of pricey growth, which dominated the 2009-2020 bull market, might be coming to an end and the baton was being passed to value stocks.

Lately, new doubts about value are resurfacing. To be bullish on value, one essentially has to be optimistic about financial stocks and commodities, including oil and materials.

Big banks have fortress balance sheets and are entering this recession in a position of economic strength, but the same can’t be said of energy and materials. Russia and Saudi Arabia are feuding and can only agree on one goal—their desire to put the American fracking industry out of existence. They seem to be executing that strategy quite efficiently.

Other commodity producers also are suffering. Dairy producers are dumping thousands of gallons of milk they can’t sell. Beef producers are seeing huge downturns in demand as restaurants are shut. Corn farmers are likely to have similar problems as the demand for ethanol tanks.

America will restart the economy next month but the reboot is likely to come slowly and be phased in stage by stage. Another industry that shows up in many value lists sadly is retailers. Thousands of department stores are expected to disappear.

Some market strategists believe that strong economic growth of 3% or more is a necessary requisite for a sustained value rally. Unfortunately, not everyone is optimistic that there will be a strong recovery once the pandemic is over. The notion that the Federal Reserve can just wave its magic money wand and business activity returns to normal isn’t realistic, according to this line of thought.

Put another way, just because the government mandated a near-depression doesn’t necessarily mean it will engineer a robust recovery. The only proximate precedent came in 1981 when Fed chairman Paul Volcker intentionally caused a nasty recession to break the back of inflation. While there was a strong rebound in 1983, many of the circumstances in that era were very different from today’s world.

One contrarian skeptic is Rupal Bhansali, chief investment officer of international equities at Ariel Investments and author of Non-Consensus Investing. In her view, the virtuous cycle reinforced by the longest economic expansion in American history is about to turn vicious. She would not be surprised if the S&P 500 fell 40% from its high on Good Friday.

Forty percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, Bhansali notes, and many of these folks were among the first to get laid off. Others have pointed out that it is unrealistic to expect millions of small businesses, such as small retailers, restaurants and bars, to all get back on their feet.

As a style of investing, value was challenged during the entire bull market. As mentioned above, it is the first to rebound after a recession is over.

Bhansali is doubtful it will happen this time. She views the dramatic rebound in equities since late-March—highlighted by the week shortened by Good Friday, which was the best week for stocks in 46 years—as a head fake.

When it comes to traditional value, Bhansali maintains many of these businesses don’t have the margin of safety that value companies once did. “You don’t buy junk at clearance sale prices,” she says. “The worst is ahead in terms of earnings.”

A global investor, Bhansali points to European banks to illustrate her case. On the surface, many of these financial institutions look incredibly cheap. But unlike U.S. banks, they never recapitalized after the financial crisis and they are about enter a period of even greater pain.

Bhansali isn’t that much more optimistic about growth stocks as an asset class, as investors continue to overpay for them. “Growth companies don’t need to see their earnings disappear, they just need to disappoint,” she says. “The S&P 500 is full of overleveraged companies. Both growth and value [stocks] will prove vulnerable if there is a prolonged earnings recession.”

Worse yet, the long economic expansion that ended more abruptly than any prior cycle created conditions where “a lot of cyclical stocks were masquerading as growth stocks,” she continues. She cites Google and Facebook as two prominent examples.

Advertising is a cyclical business, but during the Great Recession online ad spending was in its infancy. In the 12 years since then, it has grown to almost 60% of all advertising and Google and Facebook dominate that market.