On February 5th, 2018, Dow Jones index fell 1,175 points after the trading day. Four economic scenarios are being analyzed in the news as of the first week of February 2018. First, there are indeed both Stock Market and bonds Bubbles. Second, the Monday Dow’s selloff is just an anticipated correction move on the investor’s side. Third, the stock market returns to the old normal of higher levels of volatility. Fourth, Trump economic effect. I need not to cover the concerns on the US economy nowadays in this blog post. Hence, the analysis that I think is needed currently is the ruling out of a contagious effect from the narratives created around the Dow’s selloff on Monday. Indeed, I believe that such narrative, if any, can be traced back to former chairman Alan Greenspan’s comments when he stated on January 31st that America has both a bond market and stock market bubbles. By discarding the contagious effect in current narratives, I side with analysts who have asserted that the Dow’s fall was just an anticipated market correction.

Can economists claim there is some association between Alan Greenspan’s comments and the Monday fall of the Dow Jones? I may not have an answer for that question yet, but We can look into the dynamics of the phenomenon to better understand how narratives could either deter or foster an economic crisis in early 2018. If there is room for arguing that Mr. Greenspan’s comments triggered the Dow Selloff on Monday, I believe we should be observing some sort of panic or manifestation of economic anxiety. By looking at data from Google Trends, I spot on breakouts that may well be understood as “spreading” symptoms. In other words, if there is any effect of Mr. Greenspan’s comments on the Dow’s selloff on Monday, we should expect to see an increase in Google searches for two terms: first “Alan Greenspan”, and second “Stock Market Bubble.” The chart below shows google trends indexes for both terms. Little to nothing can be said about the graph after a visual inspection of the data. It is hard to believe that there are narratives of economic crisis fast-spreading, nor have Mr. Greenspan’s comments had any effect on the Dow’s sell-off.

How did things occur?

Economists are lagging on the study of narratives, hence the limited set of appropriate analytics tools. Robert Shiller wrote early in 2017 that “we cannot easily prove that any association between changing narratives and economic outcomes is not all reverse causality, from outcomes to the narratives,” which is certainly accurate whenever time has passed as empirical evidence become obscure. However, on February 1st of 2018 mainstream media reported extensively a couple of statements made by Alan Greenspan about bubbles. In the following two days, several market indexes closed with relatively big loses. In detail, the events occurred as follows:

1. On January 31st, 2018 Alan Greenspan told Bloomberg News: “There are two bubbles: We have a stock market bubble, and we have a bond market bubble.”
2. On February 5th, 2018, Dow Jones index falls 1,175 point after the trading day on Monday.

Whenever these events happen, we all rush to think about Robert Shiller. As Paul Krugman cited Shiller today February 6th, 2018, “when stocks crashed in 1987, the economist Robert Shiller carried out a real-time survey of investor motivations; it turned out that the crash was essentially a pure self-fulfilling panic. People weren’t selling because some news item caused them to revise their views about stock values; they sold because they saw that other people were selling”. In other words, Robert Shiller’s work on Narrative Economics is meant for these types of conjectures. Narratives of economic crisis play a critical role in dispersing fear whenever economic bubbles are about to burst. One way to gauge the extent to which such a contagious effect occurs is by looking at google trend search levels.

No signs of fast-spreading economic crisis narratives:

Despite the ample airtime coverage, there is little to none evidence of a market crash and economic crisis. In the wave of fast pace breaking news announcing crisis and linking them to political personalities, markets seem just to be having an expected correction after an extended period of gains. The best way to conclude such correction is by looking at the firm numbers reported lately on jobs markets as well as to investigate the collective reaction to fear and expectations. Thus, four economic scenarios are being analyzed as of the first week of February. First, there are Stock Market and bonds Bubbles. Second, the Monday Dow’s selloff is just an anticipated correction move on the investor’s side. Third, the market returns to the old normal of higher levels of volatility. Fourth, Trump effect. None of the scenarios seem plausible to me. First, the selloff appears not to have dug into the investors and people’s minds, thereby avoiding the contagious effect. Second, despite the unreliability of winter economic statistics, jobs reports on January 2018 seem optimistic (I think they will revise those number low). Third, claiming volatility is back to the stock market is like claiming Trump is back into controversy. Therefore, the only option left to explain Monday’s selloff is the argument of a market correction.