Stock markets

Could it be that Donald Trump actually wants a bear market now? At some point, one was bound to happen on his watch — after all, US equities weren’t going to keep up their stunning gains from the past two years for the rest of his term. A market correction was inevitable, and it seems we’ve already seen that, as the S&P 500 dipped into correction territory this week. And a bear market was almost certainly coming, given that there have been 27 of them in the S&P index since 1928. Hartford Funds provides a good summary here, showing that the average decline in a bear market is 35 percent, and they typically last 9.6 months. By contrast, the average bull market lasts 2.6 years, with prices rising 110 percent. Overall, bear markets occur about every 3.

Donald Trump is, as we know, a noted germophobe. It would be richly ironic, then, if he missed out on a second term owing to the germ of the moment: coronavirus. Over the past 24 hours, something remarkable has been stirring in the normally wayward kingdom, Trump Tweet Land. The president has started lavishing praise on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — a government agency which he has previously treated in a rather less than admiring way. In 2017 he famously sent it a list of banned words like ‘transgender’ which he didn’t want to see in official documents. And he has since been attacked for cutting its budget. Suddenly, they are heroes who are doing a GREAT job of tackling coronavirus VERY VERY quickly.