The last time I said the stock market was this precariously poised to crash was in early 2020. A month later, the market dove headlong over a cliff, and it took all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to put the market and economy back together again.
Of course, that may not have happened if we didn’t, about a month after I wrote that statement, experience the biggest forced, worldwide, economic shutdown in history under political dictates.
That was followed by the biggest bailouts in the history of the world, which isn’t even slightly an exaggeration, by both the Fed and feds working in conjunction with all their strength. That by itself tells you how severe the market’s crash would have been without the biggest bailouts in history, since the Fed couldn’t (as I said would be the case) manage the save all on its own.
Even with both the federal government and central banksters pulling together, the S&P plunged around 35%! (This Wikipedia article will give you all the details about how enormous the crash was and the records it broke; yet, it would have been far worse without the world’s biggest bailouts to finally bring it to halt.)
Back in 2008, the only thing that got bailed out was some of the biggest banks, but in 2020, we bailed out everything—banks, major corporations, small businesses and even millions of individuals—and it still took a couple of years just to get things back to something that looked close to normal, albeit with a badly broken labor market and a lot of businesses destroyed for good.
Now the stock market, by a number of measures, is even more precariously poised than it was back then, but we have no idea if anything will come along to break its dangerous overhang loose, though there are plenty of potential black swans circling.
Of course, it won’t be a true black swan unless we never saw it circling, as was the case with the Covid lockdowns. That’s not entirely true because back in 2008 some people, like yours truly, did see the housing crisis coming, just not very many; so, for the vast majority it was a black-swan event.
For the record, the last two stock-market crashes I said looked imminent were the one in 2020, which I left at looking likely; while the one in 2022, I said month’s prior was a certainty that would begin in some indices in late 2021 due to the Fed’s tightening.
Since then, I have not predicted a market crash, but I am leaning hard into the likelihood of one in 2025. I’m just not sure when.
A 2025 stock market crash is likely and probably not too far off. A 2025 stock market crash because … things never looked worse
About the author
David Haggith is the publisher/editor-in-chief of The Daily Doom.
Economic, Social and Political News of Our Troubled Times -- a non-partisan daily collection of the most consequential stories about our complex times from multiple sources around the world plus daily editorials like the one you read here.
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