Does this mean market downturns are not a real risk?

No. Three entries on this list did serious, lasting damage: the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and 2022. The point is not that downturns are harmless. It is that the headline everyone is worried about is rarely the thing that causes one, which is why building a plan that survives a downturn works better than trying to predict the next one.

Is the national debt different this time?

The debt is a genuine long-term fiscal question, and we are not going to tell you otherwise. What the record shows is that it has been a poor market-timing signal. The United States has been downgraded three times, in 2011, 2023 and 2025. After the first one, the cost of government borrowing went down rather than up, because frightened investors bought Treasuries during a panic about Treasuries.

Is AI a bubble like the dot-com era?

Possibly, and here is the uncomfortable part of that comparison: in the late 1990s both things were true at once. The internet really did change everything, and the Nasdaq still fell about 78 percent and took roughly 15 years to regain its 2000 high. A technology can be genuinely transformative and its stocks can still be priced for more than it delivers on schedule.

Should I move to cash until things settle down?

That is a decision that depends on your actual situation, your timeline and what the money is for, so it is not something a guide can answer responsibly. It is worth a phone call. What we would say generally is that "until things settle down" has no definition, and the list on this page is largely a record of things that never fully settled.

What does Oaks actually do when the market falls?

We do not prevent losses and we cannot predict downturns. What we do is build plans so that money you need in the near term is not exposed to the market in the first place, rebalance on a schedule rather than on a feeling, use down markets for things like tax-loss harvesting where they apply, and answer the phone. The goal is that a bad market is painful rather than catastrophic.

Is the Market About to Crash? | Oaks Financial Services

The short answer

Nobody knows whether the market is about to crash, including anybody quoted in the article that worried you.

What we do know is that the worry itself is not unusual. It is close to an annual event. Below is roughly forty years of front-page reasons to sell everything. Some were noise. Some were real and expensive. Reading them in one place tends to change the question from “is something bad going to happen?” to the more useful one: “what happens to me if it does?”

Forty years of reasons to sell

1987. Black Monday. The Dow fell 22.6% in a single day, still the worst on record. No recession followed. The economy kept growing.
1989. The savings-and-loan collapse and the junk bond market seizing up. A long, costly cleanup. The banking system carried on.
1990. Iraq invades Kuwait, oil spikes, recession arrives. The recession ended in March 1991.
1992. A “jobless recovery” and deficits called unsustainable. The decade became one of the strongest expansions on record.
1994. The Fed’s fastest rate hikes in years and the worst bond market in decades. Bond losses were real. Rates stabilized the year after.
1997. The Asian financial crisis. Severe across Asia. The US expansion continued.
1998. Russia defaults and Long-Term Capital Management collapses. A Fed-organized rescue stopped the contagion.
1999. Y2K would break the banks, the grid and the planes. It passed with minor incidents.
2000. The dot-com bubble bursts. Real damage. The Nasdaq fell about 78% and took roughly 15 years to regain its high.
2001. September 11. Markets closed for four days. They reopened on the 17th. The recession ended that November.
2002. Enron and WorldCom. You could not trust any company’s accounting. Sarbanes-Oxley followed. The bear market bottomed that October.
2003. The invasion of Iraq, and SARS. The market bottomed in March 2003, as the invasion began.
2006. Housing looked like a bubble and the yield curve inverted. It was a bubble. See below.
2008. The financial crisis. Lehman Brothers fails. Real damage. The S&P 500 fell about 57% from its 2007 peak and took around five and a half years to recover it.
2010. The Flash Crash, and Greece. The flash crash reversed within the day. Greece ran for years without breaking the euro.
2011. The US loses its AAA credit rating. Debt-ceiling standoff. US borrowing costs fell. Investors bought Treasuries during a panic about Treasuries.
2012. The “fiscal cliff” and a eurozone breakup. A deal was reached. No country left the euro.
2013. The taper tantrum and a government shutdown. Tapering began that December without the predicted collapse.
2014. Ebola, and oil falling by more than half. The outbreak was contained. Cheap oil helped consumers and hurt energy companies.
2015. China devalues its currency. A sharp August selloff. Global growth slowed. No global crisis followed.
2016. Brexit, then a contested US election. Both happened. Markets fell for two days after Brexit, then recovered.
2018. The trade war, and a December selloff of nearly 20%. Recovered over the following year.
2019. The yield curve inverts. A recession is called certain. A recession did arrive, in 2020, from something nobody on this list predicted.
2020. COVID-19. The fastest decline of more than 30% ever recorded. Fell about 34% in 33 days, and regained the prior high within roughly six months.
2022. Inflation near 9%, the fastest hikes since the 1980s, Russia invades Ukraine. Real damage, and unusual: stocks and bonds fell together, so diversification into bonds did not cushion it.
2023. Silicon Valley Bank fails. The US is downgraded again. Recession declared certain. Three large banks failed. The recession did not arrive that year.
2024. The market’s gains concentrated in a handful of technology companies. Concentration remained a legitimate structural concern, not a resolved one.
2025. Tariffs, AI capital spending, and a third downgrade of US credit. Worth reading with the benefit of however much hindsight you now have.

What this actually means

This is not “relax, it always works out.” Three of those years did real, lasting damage: the dot-com bust, 2008, and 2022. Someone who retired into either of the first two did not experience a dip that resolved itself on a chart. They experienced years of their plan not working, at exactly the moment they had stopped earning. The useful pattern here is narrower than “it always recovers,” and more interesting: the thing on the front page is rarely the thing that does the damage. In 2019, every forecaster was watching the yield curve; the recession arrived on schedule the next year, caused by a virus nobody had on their list.

That is also the answer to a fair objection: this is just driving by looking in the rearview mirror. It is true that nothing above obliges the future to resemble the past. But the history here is not offered as a forecast, it is offered as calibration. Nobody can tell you what causes the next downturn or when. What the record does tell you is roughly how large a thing to be built to survive: declines near 50% have happened several times in the last hundred years, and recoveries have sometimes taken five years or more. A bridge is not designed around a guess at the heaviest truck that will cross it. It is designed to carry more than the worst one on record, with margin to spare. The useful question is not what will happen. It is whether you would come through something as bad as what already has.

The two worries on your mind

The national debt is a genuine long-term concern, and it has also been a poor market-timing signal for forty years. When the United States lost its AAA credit rating for the first time, in August 2011, the widely predicted spike in borrowing costs never came. Costs fell instead, because investors met a panic about US debt by buying US debt. It has been downgraded twice more since, in 2023 and 2025, without the predicted rupture. None of that makes the debt harmless. It does mean that nobody, including the people who have been forecasting a crisis for forty years, can tell you the date.

AI invites the same comparison people made about the internet in the late 1990s, and the honest version of that comparison cuts both ways. The internet really was as transformative as its believers claimed, and the Nasdaq still fell about 78% and took roughly fifteen years to recover. A technology can change the world and be priced for more than it delivers on schedule at the same time. “AI is real” and “AI stocks are expensive” are not opposing positions.

What we actually do about it

Here is the part we control, stated plainly, with the limits included.

We keep money you need soon out of the market. The single worst outcome in a downturn is being forced to sell something while it is down because a bill is due. Holding near-term spending in cash and short-term instruments is what makes a falling market an unpleasant thing to read about rather than an event that changes your life.

We pay particular attention to the years either side of retirement. The same average return can produce very different outcomes depending on whether the bad years land early or late, which is why a plan for someone five years from retiring should not look like a plan for someone thirty years out.

We rebalance on a schedule, not on a feeling. The point of deciding in advance is that the decision gets made by the version of you who is calm.

We use downturns where they can be used. Tax-loss harvesting and Roth conversions are both worth more when values are lower. It does not make a decline pleasant. It does mean it is not purely a loss.

We write the plan down while things are calm, so that when they are not, the conversation is about whether anything has actually changed for you, rather than starting from scratch under pressure.

And we answer the phone. Most of the damage people do to their own finances happens in the gap between being frightened and talking to somebody.

What none of that does: it does not prevent losses, it does not predict downturns, and it is not a guarantee. Any advisor who offers you one of those is telling you something they cannot know. The aim is narrower and more achievable. When the bad year comes, and one will, it should be painful rather than catastrophic, and it should not force you to change how you live.

Sources

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED Economic Data. Recession dating, interest rates, inflation and Treasury yields for the periods above.
National Bureau of Economic Research, US Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions. The official start and end dates of every recession referenced.
Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern School of Business, Annual Returns on Stock, T.Bonds and T.Bills: 1928–Current. Long-run historical returns, the same dataset behind the planning assumptions used elsewhere on this site.
J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Guide to the Markets. Annual drawdowns against calendar-year outcomes, and the clustering of the best and worst days.
US Department of the Treasury, Debt to the Penny. The current national debt figure, updated daily.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, or advice about your particular situation.