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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a lot of money in terms of personal finance. It's hard to imagine having $3,400,000,000,000 less money in your savings account.

But global nominal GDP was $80,934,771,028,340 in 2017 [0]. This is a pothole.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/

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It's a 4.2% drop, using your numbers. That's not a pothole. If looking at my savings account, I saw a sudden 4.2% drop it would not just be a "meh, it happens, no problem here" type situation.

That would be like $10 for most of the country.

That isn't really the point, though, is it?

When a person has $240 bucks in their account they know exactly what that $10 is for.

Fair, but back when I had $240 in my account, I didn’t have any stocks. Stocks were rich person problems to me back then

And for someone for who that 10 bucks is 4 percent of their total savings, that's a few days or a week or a month in some parts of the world without food to put on the table.

you might want to rethink your analysis.

global GDP is not "the stock market". The "stock market" in this story is actually the S&P 500.

The high on 2/19 was 3386.15. The low right now as I post this is 2978.76. That's a drop of 12%. That is not a pothole. That is the grand canyon, opening all at once, not over a million years.

Luckily, this is correlated to a single "act of god" event. It will recover. In the short term, however, there will be real consequences.

This is one of those very, very good times to buy.

It's not the grand canyon opening. It happened in 2008 on a bad week, and it happened in 2018 over the month of September and again in the month of December.

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