Could the Stock Market Crash?

Oh, Janet. We hope you are right. One should never say never – that has a nasty habit of coming back to bite you.
Texas and Houston are currently going through their crash. No, not a stock market crash but a hurricane and flooding crash. Hurricane Harvey has been called a ‘once in 500 years’ event.’ Except in the past twelve years, we have also had Hurricane Katrina and Sandy. They were called ‘once in 100 years events.’ The 400-year difference seems moot. It is becoming a little flippant to call them ‘once in a lifetime’ events when three ‘lifetime’ events have occurred in twelve short years. Yet, for all of them the experts did not see the devastation that was coming.
And so it is with stock market crashes. That is why we don’t believe that Janet Yellen should be so sanguine that another one won’t happen in our lifetime. Since 1900, at least twelve have occurred. Most, if not all, were not predicted by economists, central bankers, media, or politicians. Those that did predict a coming crash were usually called charlatans, doomsayers, cranks, perma-bears, and worse. We’ve been called perma-bears. Frankly, we prefer to call our viewpoint cautious optimism. We’ve also been called a gold-bug but that is another story.
The twelve crashes since 1900 we can cite are as follows:

This post was published at GoldSeek on 4 September 2017.