I may be living under a rock but i second the question: “what crash”? I am not aware of anything of the sort.

US economic growth is leveling off after the recovery in 2021. The opposition party wants to use it to retake power and is calling it a disaster to undermine optimism in the economy. Business owners fear a drop in demand and scale back hiring.

Same here. People talk also about the "2020 pandemic recession", and at least in IT I didn't notice it at all. So, yeah, maybe we (software developers) are the privileged ones. Touching wood.

At least in the markets, the NASDAQ is down roughly 30% YTD.

Which is still 50% up from 3 years ago and 80% up from the "crash" of 2018

Right, but financial markets are forward-looking (or "leading economic indicators"). They don't encode the current state, they encode a consensus prediction for some time period in the future. In this case, the stock market is pricing in a sharp downturn in profits (and margins) over at least the next few quarters, and I don't believe it's even finished.

But that's precisely why the "correction" will have to be much steeper for Fed to rein in inflation. Fed cannot magically fix the supply side: they can't control Putin or lockdown in China. The only way to bring inflation way down is by dampening demand. To dampen demand Fed essentially would like see the stock market collapse, the extra liquidity that has been injected for the past 10 years need to be evaporated so people will feel impact to bring down demand.