This, and the amount of newly public companies that received nosebleed valuations despite being pre-profit (and often enough, pre-revenue even) thanks to specul

This, and the amount of newly public companies that received nosebleed valuations despite being pre-profit (and often enough, pre-revenue even) thanks to speculation (and the fact that these companies were impressive if only because they were using essentially free borrowed money...which has now dried up). And perhaps even more problematic, the less newly public but still nonetheless overvalued companies that are actually in the major indexes (and thus, in the average person's 401k), now down 50-80% in some cases. Couple that with the bond market ALSO melting down based on the fact that the Fed was engaging in its bond buying program keeping yields artificially low for the last few years and we had a situation where the average person took on far more risk than was suitable due to having little alternative. Given how much stable companies borrowed to beef up their balance sheets, my suspicion is that the core business environment may not be as badly affected as many suspect, as they have the means available to weather the storm, but that there will be a lot of folks caught out in it when it really hits, likely with quite a few bankruptcies in the tech sector, and as a result, a fair spike in unemployment. That will undoubtedly bleed into consumer spending, but again, given the healthy balance sheets we see in more core industries, I'm not seeing a cascading failure of the whole system on my crystal ball just yet. Guessing a 6-7/10 if we wanna put a number on "how bad".