Coronavirus has only hastened the inevitable stock market crash, but expect another bull run on the back of stimulus measures

One aspect of the current crisis that has remained largely unnoticed is the orderly way equity markets have collapsed. Market systems have worked without a glitch to discover accurate asset prices to enable investors and policymakers to overreact in the short term to relatively normal long-term volatility.

The public has certainly overreacted, becoming the target of ridicule by grabbing all the toilet rolls from supermarket shelves, for example.

It then rose eight times in real terms between 1982 and 2000, disregarding the record 1987 crash, the Asian financial crisis and the bursting of the dotcom bubble. From the 2007 peak to the 2009 trough, it fell 56 per cent. The bulls then drove the index up fourfold to its all-time high just a month ago, leaving the bears to edge the S&P 500 index underfoot with a wimpy 30 per cent fall (exactly 1,000 points) to its low to date.

This column, and many others, predicted that the market was ripe for a sell-off after last year’s 29 per cent rise. The once-in-a-decade fall triggered by the coronavirus was merely an excuse – it would have happened anyway, even if it has gone down about as well as a pangolin at a wedding banquet.