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After swallowing markets from Germany to China, the bears finally reached U.S. shores. While the U.S. had been held up by stronger economic growth and better corporate profits, inflated by the 2017 tax cuts, those walls came crumbling down in December as U.S. stocks had their worst close to the year since the great depression, with the previously invincible FAANG stocks leading the decline. Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, AMD and Nvidia were among the biggest losers as investors rushed for the exit in a much less orderly way than they came into these ‘over-owned’ names. In the end, the U.S. was simply the final pin to fall in a cascade of declines that populated the overall global investment landscape in 2018 as central banks started to slowly withdraw the ‘punchbowl’ of low interest rates that had funded a bubble in financial assets.
With one trading day left, here’s a look at how some key assets have done this year:
- The S&P 500 is down 7.5%
- Japan’s Topix is down 18%
- The Stoxx Europe 600 is down almost 14%
- The MSCI Emerging Markets Index dropped about 16%
- The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index rose more than 3%
- The Bloomberg Commodity Index fell almost 12%