EliteZags said:
are you saying if a once in a century global health crisis event hadn't occurred at the last top something/anything else would've crashed the market at that point?
News and events are often just a catalyst. When the market reaches extremes in sentiment, it tends to extend until something kicks off the change of direction. Looking below, the market had reached a valuation level in late 2019 that had only been seen at major tops. It took months after that to drop, and everyone blamed COVID.
I can't say with certainty it would have dropped as low as it did had it been something other than COVID that dropped it, or if it wouldn't have found a way to extend diagonally another couple months, but yes, it would have found a reason to drop, as buying sentiment was weak up there. And fundamentally, you could argue that the only reason that bottom wasn't lower was because of the unprecedented cash injedction directly from the FED into consumer and business hands. Before COVID, liquidity injection happened through FED treasury purchasing and loaning said assets to the banks, increasing the money supply in a leveraged manner.
Lastly, in late 2019, the repo account was empty and FED liquidity had dropped to historically low levels. When there is no liquidity, that's when you see the tapping of the repo market, as its the last resort funding mechanism for short term cash needs. A massive spike is a sign that something is wrong in the system.
In early 2020 there was large spike in JPY that affected the carry trade on a global scale, and when that happens, the value of loans that have been invested in US assets rise sharply, requiring liquidity intervention or risk calamity and potential widescale default on massive leverage positions.
There was a lot going on in late 2019 and early 2020 under the hood. We didn't explode our debt because of a virus. We exploded our debt as a last ditch effort to kick the can on the global leverage system. COVID was a convenient excuse.