Watching the markets these days is like watching the seven stages of grief — shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and, finally, acceptance. We clearly have not reached that last stage yet. This isn’t really about coronavirus — that was simply a trigger for a correction I have long expected. The US is in the longest economic recovery cycle on record, with  mounds of global debt, falling credit quality, and decades of low interest rates driving asset prices to unsustainable levels. 

The reluctance of investors, politicians and central bankers to accept that is not just an example of the natural human tendency to put off pain. Rather it is something scarier and more factual. The truth is that the US economy is now dependent on asset bubbles for survival.

This was sharply quantified in a recent edition of financial analyst Luke Gromen’s weekly newsletter “The Forest for the Trees”. About two-thirds of the US economy is consumer spending. But people’s spending patterns are not based on their income alone. Our personal consumption is also linked to our expectation of wealth held in assets like stocks and bonds.