Nice timing, although the market crash that is just about starting right now is more due to lack of functional US market regulation (similar to 2008, but worse).
No the crash was coming this administration just accelerated it. Trillions of $ of government debt and private debt is up for financing at 3-4 times the interest rate.
Maybe - i've been reading that sort of permabear "the economy is about to crash because of obvious reason X" for at least 15 years now. I listened for a time sadly - it cost me a lot of missed investment growth. Eventually they'll be right, but haven't been very predictive.
However, the deliberate economic self-destruction being unleashed by trump and friends feels like a very different flavor of cause.
I'm a big proponent of the bear case, but if you factor in dividends [0] pretty much any time in the last century has nominally been a good time to invest in the S&P 500 even if the first few years aren't optimal.
The bear case is generally "this will cause a crisis, then the government is going to print money, hand it out to asset owners & lump taxpayers and citizens with the real costs". There has been a reasonable expectation that shareholders will come through fine since the '08 crisis firmed up expectations about how the government will handle problems. I don't think there is an expectation any more that the S&P will go down in nominal terms. To argue that it will someone has to come up with a theory where the Fed doesn't get involved. There have been multiple major crisii and if anything US stock market performance is the inverse of how the economy is expected to perform. For example, COVID was a big winner for shareholders and asset owners despite obviously being an economic catastrophe.
Economists have predicted 9 out of the last 5 recessions, as the saying goes.
Usually even if this it the case you don't necessarily want to pull out of the market, but buy into the dip. Unless you seriously think the stock market is going to be wiped out for years, buying the dip means you have a large position when the market starts recovering.
Most non-institutional investors rarely just have cash lying around. My assets are tied up in the market. Same as it's dangerous to try to time the top of the market, it's dangerous to try to time the bottom. I tried in a modest way in 2008, and it took me a decade to recover on those stocks.
US exports make up 11% of GDP. Of that 11%, some fraction is facing retaliatory tariffs.
Considering the DJIA went up 4,000 points from Dec then crashed 4,000 points in Jan, one should be careful assigning cause when it did it again from Jan to Mar.
A lot more than 11% of GDP relies on various imports randomly being subject to tariffs (on everything from steel and lumber to electronics). This is effecting everything from manufacturing and construction to retail.
I was honestly shocked that both the Biden admin and corporations were able to hold this off in 2023-2024 given the huge debt loads held by everything.
Possibly: Bank of Japan raises (or maintains) interest rate today or in the future, causes unwinding of the carry trade, which in turn causes over-leveraged banks (hello UBS/Credit Suisse) and hedge funds (hello Citadel, Susq, etc) to close/cover positions for margin, causing a chain-reaction and big crash.
Again, basically the same root cause as 2008: lack of regulation, lack of enforcement, institutions "investing" in dogshit wrapped in catshit that shouldn't have exited in the first place, crash.
