Agreed. This crash is very obviously due to the virus. All the other factors may have contributed to it, but were not the leading cause. Had the outbreak not occurred, we may have eventually had a crash, but we don't know for sure.

This seems to be people who were skeptical about the market attempting to prove themselves right by piggybacking their favorite reason-the-market-will-crash onto this event.

I don’t know that this even fits the simple 5 why questions of root cause analysis. I’m not savvy enough to understand the financial underpinnings of the economy but this sounds like we just stopped at the first “why”, meaning it’s more likely a proximate cause. Removing a proximate cause may just mean another precipitating event could have led to a similar outcome eventually

Yeah, the parent comment here clearly has an agenda.

The virus is literally shutting down economic activity. High leverage never shut down an economy.

I agree. We were overdue for a correction, based on more than a century of stock & economic patterns. Something was gonna knock it down eventually. The longer a bull market goes on, the more fragile it becomes, like an over-inflated balloon. It was already artificially propped up by tax cuts and interest rate cuts. That "stimulus" was premature; reverse Keynes. Save up for a rainy day by paying down debt during the crest. Well, it's raining now and the piggy bank is empty. Enjoy the bacon....

Me and friends were speculating just a few months back that for a crash to happen, one of the FAANGs has to fail, spectacularly. Even with the privacy concerns, that we deemed as top risk factor, we did not see that crash happen.

Little did we know that the concentration of talent in Bay Area, Seattle, NYC and maybe London and Vancouver would be the trigger. I wonder if this gets any worse, and if one team coincidentally is wiped out, would the org be able to actually play their DR scenarios and rebuild their stack!!

"Little did we know that the concentration of talent in Bay Area, Seattle, NYC and maybe London and Vancouver would be the trigger."

Really?

This is an incredibly self-centered and myopic view of things.

Bro, the software industry isn't the center of the universe, or the global economy.

Restaurants are closed, travel is at a standstill, events are getting cancelled, and you're over here talking about engineers getting sick..... wow.

Let me try to explain but I think it may be futile. I just mentioned a conversation as part of the bigger discussion. Sure i could put it differently but it does not make my point invalid.

When we talk of the 1 percenters, when we talk of 0.1%, we are talking about wealth being unequally distributed. When we look at S&P or nasdaq, we see the pumping up of market in select names only. Forget the past month, and go look back at the past 3 years and compare the growths of tech companies with the non tech and see the difference. And the topic of this thread is market crash, not the dystopian or utopian world so my perspective is pretty much based on that.

Also, I am not saying the country is not at the standstill, but our whole supply chain, our whole messaging(WhatsApp and what not), a lot of our healthcare runs on software being managed by teams of 5-15, in many cases run from the same building. Not everywhere but in so many companies. I am not laying out a conspiracy theory just laying down the facts, as I understand them. If having a second data center is essential to modern DR, why is the same need of redundancy not relevant for people.

Re: for a crash to happen, one of the FAANGs has to fail, spectacularly.

Demand for digital services has gone up due the epidemic. Big Tech will do fine, but everything around them may crumble.

I don’t think the risk is centered around (typically young) software teams.

Closing borders, flights, events, bars, and restaurants has way more impact.

Correct.

A complete suspension of commerce in the service sector due to a sudden, unprecedented change in consumer behavior is a massive economic shock that I've never witnessed in my lifetime.

The good news is that this isn't a case where there is a lack of capital available (like 2008), and many businesses will be able to weather it. However, we need to be very aggressive about bailing out the businesses that are too small or constrained to weather the storm.