Stocks, bonds and crypto-currencies took a massive beating last Friday with a spillover carnage on Monday, and the mood now is reminiscent of a gloominess that is all too familiar. It feels like the start of something worse to come, again, or maybe just another 'flash crash'. Early days and only time will tell.

Of course, the troubling comparisons take us to events like that of 2008 with the mortgage & American Banking crisis that rapidly spread to the world’s markets. Or, to a lesser extent, the bursting of the dot-com bubble of the early 2000's, where overvalued internet companies started popping their peaks from the frenzied late 1990's. The NASDAQ fell sharply as a result of that dotcom bubble.

Last Monday’s free fall with the Dow hitting bottom after losing nearly 1,600 points [at one stage] is remindful of the “Black Monday” crash, leading to a worrisome market outlook that defined 1987 and onwards.

Nonetheless, if stocks and bonds are any gauges of what is to come, all indications point that we’ve reached a major turning point where the combined loss in stocks and bonds was the worst since February 2009. Scary days on Wall Street are here.

Of course, this old bull market that lasted 2 Obama administrations, extended all the way to Trump [9 years to be precise]. We have always challenged how the US markets can sustain themselves with such demanding price valuations, a debt ceiling hitting the roof, possibly a more aggressive Fed tightening, trade frictions, weak dollar, rising twin deficits, together with controversial tax reform. It was not a matter of why a crash was inevitable; rather just a matter of time.

An awkward situation now for Goldman Sachs, who in November 2017 described its 2018 outlook as one of “rational exuberance”, pegging a year-end target of 2850 for the S&P.

Not just for Goldman but 80% of Wall Street bankers and investment houses surveyed last year, from Bank of America to Citigroup postured rosy market returns for 2018, ranging from 18% to 20%. Of course, we are not discounting the other possibility that this “bull” market will resume after suffering a much needed 'flash crash' correction, but we maintain that economic fundamentals from rising rates to lofty valuations must at some point limit its steam, if not curtail it.

It’s not just Wall Street bankers who were harking of good times ahead for the market and the economy this 2018. Trump in the White House frequently boasted when the markets were hitting record highs may now have to cower in his sleeves.

Unusually quiet, last week’s market downturn could in effect also herald a turning point for Trump with all indicators pointing to a government that could not govern, hence the GOP deadlock and everything else we opined on in 2017.

With a first 12 months of nothing but political adversity, Trump and his administration enter a phase where he has to face the economic challenges, and that first and foremost, he does not control market forces.

If the stock market was a measure of his performance, as he has always postured, it might now be time to buckle up.