Friday's jobs report sent the S&P 500 into a tailspin, hinting that last Tuesday's low was not the successful retest of the correction that some thought had ended on Aug. 25. Regardless of the eventual low, investors remember that prices typically lead fundamentals, causing them to wonder if the current selloff is a warning that the U.S. is at risk of falling into recession.
What's next for the economy?
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Can the answer be that simple? Does a 10 percent-plus decline in the S&P 500 predict that a U.S. recession will soon be at hand? Not according to history, which shows that while all recessions were preceded by corrections or bear markets, there were nearly three times the number of 10 percent-plus declines than there were recessions since 1948.
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While all recessions were preceded by stock market declines in excess of 10 percent, not all of these recession-forecasting declines were bear markets.
Three were corrections. In all, 67 percent of bear markets (eight of 12) correctly anticipated an impending recession, while a third were false alarms. In addition, only 16 percent (three of 19) of all corrections accurately projected the approach of a recession.
What's more, the corrections that did correctly signal an approaching recession were relatively mild, as the S&P 500 fell from 10.2 percent to 14.8 percent.
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Conversely, the five corrections that fell by more than 15 percent, did not accurately predict that a recession was right around the corner.
In all, the number of 10 percent-plus declines (31) exceeded recession counts (11) by a near 3-to-1 margin. As a result, MIT economics professor and Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson's amusingly accurate statement that "Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions" should probably be updated to read "The S&P 500 has anticipated 31 of the last 11 recessions."
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Commentary by Sam Stovall, U.S. equity strategist, S&P Capital IQ and and author of "The Seven Rules of Wall Street." Follow him on Twitter @StovallSPCAPIQ