As the country’s largest companies prepare to report their results for the start of the year — offering a view into how the economy is faring as a banking shock reverberates — they’re already warning investors to brace themselves.For the big businesses that make up the S&P 500 index, Wall Street’s forecasters expect that profits in the first three months of 2023 fell almost 7 percent from a year earlier, according to estimates collected by FactSet. That would be the second consecutive quarterly decline, and the biggest since a severe — though brief — slump in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.The forecast marks a swift deterioration in predictions. At the start of the year, the consensus was that profits would be roughly in line with the first quarter of 2022. But since then, contin …
