One year after the coronacrash of 2020, is the real financial crisis coming?

London (-11%) and New York (-10%) have experienced something unheard of since the stock market crash of October 1987.

The markets suffered even more in the following days. On March 16, the US indices fell more than 12%.

“It was a real madness, the market was falling at such a rate that we thought it would not hit bottom”, remembers Ipek Ozkardeskaya, analyst at Swissquote Bank in London.

And now, just a year later, many of the same rates have returned or are above their pre-pandemic levels.

The US Nasdaq index, which includes technology stocks, rebounded in June. Between its lowest point, March 23, 2020, and its last record, February 12, 2021, it climbed 105%.

Some values ​​exploded in 2020, such as Tesla (+ 743%), Zoom (+ 396%) and Modern Biotech (+ 434%). In Frankfurt, the Dax breaks one record after another.

Nothing to do with the long crisis that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008. In fact, the scenario is the opposite, since this time, it was the paralysis of the real economy that affected the markets.

“We are facing a completely new supply crisis”, Eric Bourguignon, head of third-party securities activity at Swiss Life AM, told AFP.

The global economy has frozen, with factories closed, border closings, flights suspended, and shops and restaurants closed.

He was “the first time that we had a recession so deep, so global but perceived as so short” at the time, recalls Vincent Mortier, Deputy Managing Director of Amundi.

For Kokou Agbo-Bloua, global head of macroeconomic research at Societe Generale, everything is recalled “War situations”.

Therefore, central banks and governments they acted “with great force without being held responsible” according to Mortier. A “very massive” reaction which “was only financed by debt”.

They injected “$ 24 trillion” in new money globally, says Agbo-Bloua, whom the markets have welcomed with open arms because they have been “addicted to liquidity”, according to Bourguignon.

The stock market experienced “a definitive black swan” in 2020, This is a completely unpredictable event, according to JJ Kinahan, head of market strategy at TD Ameritrade in New York. “The way we got out of it is absolutely amazing.”

So amazing that he’s always careful The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank of central banks, is seeing signs of exuberance similar to those of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.

“It would be very dangerous to think that the end of the health crisis is equivalent to the end of the crisis, in fact it is the opposite”, Warn Mortier.

“The Achilles heel of this precarious balance” created by debt, “is clearly inflation”, analiza Agbo-Bloua.

Over the past few weeks, Investors are watching with concern the rise in interest rates and fear to expect prices to rise, which would lead central banks to turn off the liquidity tap.