Are We Already in a Bear Market?
With stock market falling again on Wednesday—the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down about two hundred and fifty points—we’ll be seeing a lot of talk about whether we have entered a bear market. Such discussions rarely yield much insight. On Wall Street, the conventional definition of a bear market is a fall in stock prices of more than twenty per cent from the previous peak: anything less is referred to as a “correction.” But this definition can be misleading.