> rebalancing of people’s portfolios values
It's not just portfolio value. It's well accepted in the economics that wealth impact's people spending (see wealth effect and its cousin negative wealth effect)
Yeah it does but we were coming off of the hottest economic decade in a long time, government surplus and all, my point is it’s more like Monopoly money than money people were using to buy groceries. Wall Street could have survived a bad quarter without a stimulus/bailout. Anyone with a portfolio/paying attention knew the stock market was due for a correction just not when or how severe.