Uncertainty surrounding Coronavirus leads stock market to worst week since 2008

February 28, 2020 6:18 PM

Maher Kawash,

Posted: February 28, 2020 6:18 PM

by Maher Kawash

SPOKANE, Wash.– The uncertainty surrounding Coronavirus just led the stock market to its worst week of trading since 2008.

For the last seven days, stocks have been in the red as there has been more than $6 trillion of market value lost.

Many financial experts said it was only a matter of time before we saw a dip in the market like this.

“We’ve been talking about this with our clients for 2-3 years that it’s due to come down,” Quantum Financial Planning Owner Eric Christiansen said. “We just didn’t know what might have that market come down.”

Now. the concern comes with many left to wonder how the U.S. will handle an outbreak like this.

This isn’t the first time an unknown virus has impacted the economy, though.

“We’ve seen SARS, we’ve seen Zika Virus. When both of those things happened the market for 40 days was down about 12.8 or 12.9 percent,” Christiansen said.

Overall, the market is in correction now, suffering a fall of at least 10 percent but no more than 20 percent.

The global spread of Coronavirus has companies like Microsoft and PayPal saying they won’t meet revenue targets because of interruptions to production and demand.

There are comparisons to the 2008 stock market crash, but experts believe the economy is in better shape now.

“You had more things out there. People we’re getting loans they shouldn’t have, real estate was really overpriced at that time,” Christiansen said. “We’ve seen real estate go up, but people aren’t able to get into a house that they really can’t afford.”

People nearing retirement are seeing thousands of dollars disappear from their 401k, but Christiansen said the worst thing you can do is panic.

“It’ll come back. It’s not that you’re about to retire, and the market’s going to go down and you’re not going to recover,” Christiansen said. “If you sell, you’re not going to recover.”

When the market crashed in 2008, it took people in Spokane about 18 months to get back to even. The stock market as a whole took nearly three years to balance out.