What is it about March? October, the month of the 1929 Wall Street crash and the crash of 1987, is often cited as the most dangerous for investors. Yet in the past three crashes or bear markets it has been March which saw the worst. The FTSE bottomed out in March 2003, shortly before the Iraq invasion, then again in March 2009, just as the Bank of England began its quantitative-easing programme. Then it happened again in 2020 when markets sank due to Covid – they staged a miraculous recovery on the very day that the first lockdown began in Britain.
Many investors will be asking whether SVB’s collapse has brought forward the expected peak in interest rates
Is history about to repeat itself? Markets in Britain and around the world have taken a battering over the past week thanks to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and associated fallout. According to one estimate doing the rounds this morning, $465 billion (approximately £381 billion) has been wiped off global stock indices.
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