[nostrademons]

"historically in the U.S. so far the market has always recovered."

This is sorta enshrining survivorship bias in your premises - take the largest economy around today and point out that every time it's crashed, it's recovered. Well, if it hadn't, there wouldn't be anything to point at.

There are actually plenty of examples - even among European settlers of the Americas - where the economy did not recover. The Continental Congress and the monetary system setup under it failed through hyperinflation, leading to the expression "not worth a Continental", and then the country had to be rebooted under the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, plantation owners in the Confederate States of America were totally wiped out - not only was the currency debased, the infrastructure destroyed, and the plantations burned, but the whole legal framework under which the plantation system operated was rewritten.

[waterphone]

Yes, it's an imperfect predictor of the future. No one else does a very good job predicting economic futures either, however.

[hueving]

But you are comparing with fledgling/emerging markets. Samples of failures at this point to scare people should be declines of economies established for more than a hundred years. The falls of empires, etc. Those are what are relevant to the current US investor.