Long Term

What we learned in this rout: This is what a late stage market looks like

What we learned in this rout: This is what a late stage market looks like

Before this market rout and from the safety of the World Economic Forum in Davos, hedge fund legend Ray Dalio talked about the coming bear market in bonds and likelihood that we were near the end of this cycle of economic boom. Sometime in the next two years, he remarked, we were likely to experience a recession and that would put an end to one of the longest periods of economic growth in the United States. With the experience of the big market rout of January 26 through February 8 behind us–if it indeed is–when the Standard & Poor 500 stock index fell 9.03%, I’d like to make Dalio’s comments a little more explicit and apply them more directly to the stock market.

Global trade isn’t waiting for President Trump–it’s slowing down NOW

In his campaign Donald Trump promised to kill the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal and renegotiate NAFTA. Countries like China and Mexico faced the prospect of crippling tariffs on their goods. That left international economists deeply worried about a slowdown in global trade, a slowdown that might be sufficient to produce a global recession. Well, don’t worry. Even before Trump won the November 8 election globe trade had started to slow.