Stocks regained footing this week after a massive global sell-off had investors hitting the panic button. But amid all the negativity, one economist says all Wall Street needs to do is "take a deep breath and relax."

On CNBC's "Futures Now," Bank of America Merrill Lynch's Ethan Harris said that rather than fret over uncertainty in China, investors should look at the market for what it really is: overdone.

"I think that the market is overwhelmed with too many blindside hits," Harris said Tuesday. "You had geopolitical concerns around the Middle East and North Korea, you had weakness in the equity market and currency market in China, you had a little bit of soft data, and if you put it all together it was just a little bit too much for the equity market."

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Stocks took a turn on Tuesday, seeing their best session of the 2016 after posting their worst start to a year in history. The S&P 500 gained nearly 1 percent and the rallied more than 117 points.

For Harris, the recent selling pressure draws a striking similarity to what we saw late summer. "At this stage, the risk-off trade in the markets reminds us of a similar sell-off in late August: a sharp, but temporary risk-off trade, that helped impact the timing of the Fed liftoff but did not fundamentally alter the global economic and policy outlook."

While Harris anticipates further weakness in China, he stressed that it should not continue to drive U.S. and global stock markets in the way it has this past week. "China is not that important to the U.S. economy," he said. " The Chinese equity market is kind of on its own little path right now, divorced from the rest of the world," he said.

He expects the negative sentiment to continue until investors begin to see the "silver lining behind the dark cloud" that's been lingering above the market.