Every year there are ghost stories of US stock market crashes. Will this year be another one without serious consequences? 01) Ghost Stories Every Year: A Chronicle of Crashes in the Last Five Years Having spent a long time in the market, you'll notice a pattern: every year, the market tells a terrifying ghost story. The stories change every year, but the endings are strikingly similar. Looking back at the last five years, it's almost like each year is a hurdle: 2022 was the worst year, with violent interest rate hikes and the Russia-Ukraine war. The outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war and the violent interest rate hikes of the US dollar arrived simultaneously—a geopolitical black swan event coupled with a general tightening of liquidity, a typical macro version of the "Davis Double Play." The Nasdaq fell by more than 30% from its peak, global stocks and bonds suffered a double blow, and countless people's balance sheets were permanently reshaped that year. The hole created that year was the deepest in five years. In 2023, the ghost story changed to Silicon Valley Bank. A bank with $200 billion in assets collapsed within three days, followed closely by other banks, with Credit Suisse being urgently sold off at a bargain price. The market once believed that "Lehman Brothers 2.0" had arrived, with autopsy reports on regional banks flying everywhere. What happened? The Federal Reserve quickly deployed the BTFP tool, opening the liquidity valve, and the panic dissipated within three months. In 2024, it was the yen's turn to raise interest rates. The Bank of Japan ended its era of negative interest rates, and carry trades were unwound on a massive scale. On "Black Monday," August 5th, the Nikkei index plummeted 12% in a single day, and global markets followed suit. The speed at which the fear index surged was comparable only to March 2020 and October 2008. However, three weeks later, the market seemed as if nothing had happened. In 2025, the ghost story unfolded in two parts. The first half was marked by Trump's tariff war, the emergence of "reciprocal tariffs," and widespread talk of the doomsday of global supply chains. The second half saw the exposure of financing scams within AI, with the tricks of computing power leasing and revolving revenue being revealed, leading the market to question the financial authenticity of the entire AI narrative. Both times, the Nasdaq trembled, but neither time the bull market ended. This year, 2026, the story unfolds in two parts. The first half is marked by the Iraq War—decapitation strikes, retaliation, and the looming threat of the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil prices to soar; the second half is marked by the midterm elections, with the Democrats gaining control of both houses of Congress and beginning to liquidate data centers, fundamentally undermining the belief in computing power capital expenditure. The US stock market was once again plunged into the abyss. 02) Why did it manage to escape unscathed each time? Every "ghost story" creates a deep crater in the market. Some craters are deep and take a long time to fill, like the one in 2022, which took nearly two years; others are shallow and short-lived, like the one in August 2024, which was filled in just three weeks. But without exception—the US stock market ultimately emerged, continuing its surge, reaching new highs, and extending the bull market. This isn't luck; there are two underlying logics. The first logic is the new global investment and innovation cycle brought about by the AI revolution. This isn't an ordinary inventory cycle, nor is it a typical equipment upgrade cycle; it's a superposition of the Juglar and Kondratiev waves—a decade-long wave of capital expenditure nested within a long wave of technological revolution that occurs only once every fifty or sixty years. Throughout human history, the steam engine, electricity, and the internet—each wave of general-purpose technology diffusion has sparked epic investment and growth, and AI is the culmination of this phenomenon. Productivity is increasing, consumption is expanding, and corporate profits are steadily rising—this is the strongest foundation of the bull market. As long as this underlying narrative remains intact, every crash is merely a deep squat in the middle of a bull market. The second logic is that the massive quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve since the pandemic has raised the overall level of global asset pricing. Massive amounts of liquidity are trapped in the financial system with nowhere else to go. Every panic, seemingly a flight from risk, is actually just a temporary relocation of funds within risky assets. If the water is deep enough, the ship won't sink. 03) Will this time be another close call? So, the core question is: will the market, like it has been for the past five years, experience another close call and return to a bull market? My answer is: it depends on the market; generalizations are not possible. The probability of the US market returning to a bull market is high. There are two reasons for this. First, the AI technological revolution itself is real. What's being eliminated is only the valuation bubble and disorderly capital expenditure, not the overall trend of technology diffusion—data center construction will slow down and become more standardized, but it won't stop because the real growth in computing power demand is there. Second, the Democratic Party's purge is "for high-quality development," not to bury the market—ordinary Americans invest in stocks, and Democratic elites also invest in stocks; both parties have a fundamental common interest in maintaining the stability of the capital market. Historically, every "left-wing correction" has created a "golden opportunity" in hindsight, except for exceptions like 1929, which only occurred when the technological cycle had already exhausted itself, which is clearly not the case today. However, we probably can't be so optimistic about other markets. Markets like South Korea and the A-shares market will likely gradually bottom out and trend upwards—after all, the global liquidity environment is improving, the war is ending, and tariffs are being reduced. However, it's important to note that these markets experienced a severe bear market, which often leads to a weak bull market. Breaking through previous highs will face considerable pressure. The reason is not hard to understand. The US stock market bull run is anchored by "global pricing power in the technological revolution," ensuring there are buyers to support it during downturns. Meanwhile, valuations in other markets are largely parasitic on the US AI capital expenditure chain—South Korea's storage and China's computing hardware export chains are essentially "supplying US data centers." When the chain leaders begin to cut spending and deflate the bubble, the profit expectations of chain members will be systematically revised downwards. Valuation gaps can be filled with liquidity, but profit gaps can only be filled with time. Returning to the question in the title: Will this time be another close call? For the US, the most likely scenario is that the long cycle of the technological revolution is not yet complete, the massive liquidity has not receded, and after the panic clears, the mid-term whistle of the bull market will sound again. For other markets, the situation is "alarming, but the danger won't completely disappear"—a bottom will form, a recovery will occur, but jumping directly from a bear market to a bull market is unrealistic. For five years, the market has told ghost stories every year, and every year people liquidate their positions and leave, only to regret it later. This shouldn't teach us to "blindly buy the dip," but rather to distinguish between ghost stories at the bottom of a cycle and death knells at the top. There's only one criterion for identification: Has the underlying technological revolution and profit cycle died? If the answer is no—then every ghost story is an opportunity disguised as horror. But if one day, the protagonists of these ghost stories are no longer liquidity, politics, or war, but the technological revolution itself has died down—that's when the real bear market will begin.