My pleasure to welcome you here at the Clark Howard Show where it's all about you learning

ways to save more and spend less and don't let anyone ever rip you off.

So the stock markets here in the United States and elsewhere in the world are having significantly

rough days and I don't know and nobody knows if this is the beginning of a true lasting

stock market route that would lead to what's known as a correction where the value of your

investments in your 401k or an investment account or whatever would fall typically 10%

or more or this could be the start of a bear market which is a decline of 20% or more

or it's just a few bad trading days.

The reality is that what set off the problems for investors is the extreme increase in the

number of coronavirus cases in the United States.

A point where hospitalizations are surging and we are at what public health people

refer to as a critical point is the kindest words they're using.

There are some that are like talking about panic about what's going on with coronavirus

and we do have a real problem because we have the public health aspect of people getting

ill.

We are going to have unfortunately a spike in the number of Americans who die from coronavirus.

The good news is something that I talked about recently and that is that the hard working

people in medicine have come up with better ways to treat people and so as they've learned

over this year and so even with the spike in cases the fatality rates will not be as ugly

versus number of cases as they were earlier this year.

But regardless this is really ugly for the economy and there doesn't matter the false

choice arguments about lockdowns, not lockdown, whatever.

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