It sounds a little bit scary.

What it means is that the stock market is down more than 10%

from its last record high,

which we saw only a few days ago.

It's hard to remember now with all this sea

of red on Wall Street.

However, I think it's important to keep in mind --

corrections don't mean everything as --

you know, as everything is crumbling around us.

This is a healthy check on the market.

It's happened seven times during the last 10 years.

So, it's not unusual to have something like this happen.

What you really would get nervous about

is if the market were to fall 20%,

which would take us into a bare market.

That means that this epic run of stocks

that we've had for the last 10 years would suddenly be over,

but we are not in that kind of situation yet.

So, why is this happening?

Why is the market in a correction?

Really, there's two key things going on here.

Number one is obvious, and that is this coronavirus.

Nobody really has a good handle on how long this is gonna last,

how many people are going to be impacted,

when is this going to end?

The second thing that's important to remember

is most analysts would tell you the stock market

coming into 2020

was really highly priced, probably overpriced,

and so we have this perfect recipe

going on to have a massive sell-off

when we have fears

that the stock market was already overvalued.

Somebody on Wall Street told me, you know,

"Everybody kind of had their finger

hovering over the sell button heading into the new year,"

and on top of that, we now have this massive uncertainty.

People don't understand how it's going to impact

companies and corporate profits, and the big concern here

is could this tip the United States

or any other country into a recession?

So, how likely is the US economy to toppling into a recession?

That's a question I get all the time,

and I wish I knew the magic answer, too.

Here's a good benchmark to think about.

About a month ago, before we really knew this coronavirus,

how much it was spreading

and how big the impact was going to be,

the recession fear was about 20% probability.

That's pretty typical.

In a year, you know, when there's no risk,

it's about a 15% to 20% probability of a recession.

Today, that has crept up to more like 30% to 40%,

so we're a good bit higher than we were a month ago

on the recession.

But notice that people haven't crossed the 50% mark.

It's not a surety that we will go into a recession.

The best forecasters still anticipate

a really rough couple of months,

but then a pretty strong rebound in the summer

and heading into the fall,

but obviously, we'll know more as things go along.

Remember, a recession is two quarters,

so six straight months of negative activity.

So far, we haven't seen any signs that the United States

has had a negative month, let alone a negative quarter.

We had a very strong January.

So, we're coming into this in about as good of a place

as we can be,

and we'll just have to see how long it lasts.