Until Tuesday, the US stockmarket had gone 109 days without a fall of more than 1%. On Tuesday the S&P 500 fell 1.2%. Oh, said one investor on Twitter: "so stocks can go down as well as up?" Indeed they can. And this is exactly the kind of time when they do. The last eight years have been all about falling interest rates and rising stockmarkets to the point where it is hard for most of us to imagine anything else. We should.
As Robin Angus, the chairman of Personal Assets Trust, points out in his latest letter to shareholders, a great question to have asked yourself 30 years ago would have been what a world in which US ten-year Treasuries yielded 2.3% would have looked like. No one asked that question, since "to have done so would at that time have seemed as detached from reality" as asking ten years ago what a US run by Donald Trump would have looked like.
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