Stock market crash!" read the panicked headlines last week, after the spread of the coronavirus continued with outbreaks of COVID-19, the disease the virus causes, in Iran, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States.
The resulting fear caused the US stock market to have its worst week since the start of the 2008 recession.
But should people be stressing about the market upheaval? Is your money at risk? We look at the experts for advice on how the coronavirus is affecting the markets.
What exactly is going on and why is the stock market freaking out?
Markets really don't like uncertainty, because it makes it hard for businesses to plan. So the spread of a potential global disease fuels huge panic.
Investors have been selling their stock to get their money out of the market, or into "safer" investments. Last week $5 trillion was wiped from global financial markets.
The Dow — short for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an index of 30 major blue-chip stocks that is often used as an indicator for the market itself — had its single biggest one-day drop in history, falling 1,191 points on Thursday.
But the drop felt even more dramatic because two weeks earlier the Dow hit a record high.
"Part of the stock market decline is the result of stocks being overvalued," economist Mark Weisbrot, codirector of Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank focused on economic policy, told BuzzFeed News — meaning the drop was partly just the market correcting itself.
While it was the biggest point drop in history, there have been much larger drops in terms of percentage of the Dow overall. For some historical comparison, the Dow dropped 4.4% last Thursday, however during the Wall Street crash of 1929, it dropped 13% one day and 12% the day after.
Plus, it's not like years and years of investment gains got wiped out last week.
"The stock market saw its worst week since the financial crisis as coronavirus fears gripped markets," said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com, in a statement. "But the market is still higher than it was as recently as last August."
