stock market

The dual battle against the covid-19 virus and resulting financial turmoil continues. As it happens, in my annual State of the Markets presentation this year, I spent some time discussing economic history. This is a subject I’ve been increasingly reading about over the last 18 months.

It has been an extraordinary month as the reality of the spreading coronavirus and its economic consequences sets in. Unfortunately, the playbook for managing a pandemic of this nature will most certainly result in a hit to the economy. This crisis will pass, but the consensus among experts is it will likely take months.

Whew…what a week! It brings me back to my first year in the industry. I reported to work the first week of January 2008. Little did I (or anyone else for that matter) know we were on the doorstep of a huge market downturn.

In mid-February, we hosted our annual “State of the Markets” breakfast. Once again the weather was crummy. In fact, the snow was bad enough that schools closed locally. That’s the second time in four years we’ve held our event on a day that school was canceled!

Every election cycle we get a handful of clients inquiring about repositioning ahead of voters going to the polls. Our advice is virtually always the same, if your time frame and investment objectives haven’t changed, neither should your positioning. 

This month marks the ten-year anniversary of the climax of the 2008 financial crisis. That September, falling asset prices led to the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers. The collapse started a domino effect which nearly brought down the entire global financial system. Both the US economy and stock market bottomed out in the following months at different points in 2009.