U.S. markets wrap up worst week since the 2008 financial crisis
Source: Washington Post
U.S. markets finished one of their all-time messy weeks Friday, tumbling more than 10 percent from where they began Monday to wrap up their worst weekly finish since the 2008 financial crisis. Stocks were wrenched all week in hourly spasms as investors try to fathom where the coronavirus will eventually leave the U.S. economy.
The craziness ran right up to Friday’s closing bell, as the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 3 percent minutes after the World Health Organization warned that world health systems were “collapsing” under the coronavirus. The Dow closed shed than 925 points, more than 4.6 percent, to close a 19,160 -- erasing all Trump-era gains. The S&P closed down 4.4 percent. The Nasdaq f fell around 3.8 percent..
Investors remain in the same fog they have inhabited since markets began their swift drop in February and the S&P 500 and Dow had reached all-time highs. All three indexes are now in a bear market decline of at least 20 percent from their top.
“We had years of low volatility and rising markets, and this virus crisis made it call come to an end at once,” said Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist at the Schwab Center for Financial Research. “There is no endpoint in site, and that’s causing a degree of panic because people are saying, ‘I just need to hold some cash.’ There will be more turmoil, but we flushed out a lot of the people who were leveraged. A lot of good things are happening to restore liquidity and order to markets.” Markets lurched all week as a seemingly endless stream of federal government measures were rolled out to douse financial fires in vital corners of the economy.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/20/stocks-markets-today-coronavirus/
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They love to cherry-pick dates but pointing out that from the time he took the oath until now, everything that he supposedly brought to bear, has gone the way of his 6 bankruptcies. 
while MAGAts waited until Trump, so many of those idiots bought high and are doing something right now that's going to require a lot of toilet paper 
obviously deeply into that. I read that a "collapse" is defined as 40% down, so we still have a bit further to go to get to that. (I don't know how widespread that definition of "collapse" is. And I don't know if 30% down has a special name like a "plunge" or something. I'm struggling to come up with a single word that is bad, but not as bad as a "collapse"
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Last edited Tue May 12, 2020, 06:30 PM - Edit history (8)
But it's interesting to me it's a bit below the low points at the end of 2018 (I remember the last 2 months or so of 2018 as being icky, and IIRC the S&P 500 was a little bit negative for the year overall in 2018)
Then my eye sees that stuff in 2015 and early 2016, and it looks if it gets below about 180 (from its current level of 229), then there's nothing that looks like "support" until the latter half of 2011 at around 118 --
Yahoo SPY all the way back to 2000
S&P 500 all the way back to 1928, logarithmic scale
On the above chart, one has to (a) click on the "[-]" of the "[-][+]" at the bottom center of the chart
(b) To the right of the chart, in the middle on a vertical axis, there is a blue [>] button. Click on that to get rid of the quotes to the right of the chart. That expands the date-range shown on the chart.
If you aren't getting logarithmic, there's a sprocket wheel (settings) just above the chart, 3rd from the far right. Click on that and select logarithmic.
It should show intervals of 1 month. If not, click on "Interval" (just above the chart to the right of the middle), and choose 1 month. That results in showing more date range than the default 1 week.
The interesting thing is how small the collapses (all more than 40%) of 1972-1975, 2000-2001, and 2007-2009, and yes, 2020-present (down 32% so far as of 3/20/20 close) are compared to the general trend of the S&P 500 index which historically has doubled on average about every 9 years (with reinvested dividends it's more like a 7 year doubling time)
Edited to add: I created an Imgur image:
It goes all the way from 1928 to Friday's 3/20/20 close at 2304.92
For those who might not know or remember this trick -- To see the chart blown up (this is very well worth doing) : Right click on the graph and click on "open image in new tab" or "open in new window" or whatever terms your browser has for it. Anyway it makes it so much easier to read.
The important characteristic of the logarithmic y-axis scale to me is that an upward sloping STRAIGHT line represents a constant percentage increase, e.g. something that rises by e.g. 9% per year (or whatever percent a year) is a straight line on a logarithmic graph like this. (Ditto for something declining by a fixed percentage per year -- it will appear as a downward sloping straight line).
A doubling of the index back when it was like 40 is just as important to wealth (it doubles it) as a doubling when it is at 1000. On a linear scale, the movement of the market in the early years is just about impossible to see because it's all just a slightly wiggling line crawling around the horizontal axis. Whereas on a logarithmic scale, a doubling is the same vertical distance whether its a doubling from 40 or from 1000.
It's interesting how insignificant the dot-com bust and the housing bubble bust and the March 2020 32% crash are, compared to the doubling of the index that occurs about every 9 years ON AVERAGE.
Note this is just the index (dividends are ignored). A graph that included reinvested dividends would reach about triple the amount.
(Actually it's a semi-logarithmic graph -- the y-axis is logarithmic while the x-axis is linear.)
