Stock prices are about due for a major correction. Consider the graph below, which I derived from statistics available here. I define a major decline as one that lasts at least 6 months and results in a real drop of at least 25 percent in the real (inflation-adjusted) price or total return of the S&P Composite Index.

When will the correction come? No one knows, though there are probably many (and varying) predictions. But I expect it to come during Biden’s one-term presidency. (I have bet the price of a Prius that it will happen before broad market indices rise much more.) And given the run-up in stock prices since the last major correction, it will be a doozy. During the correction of November 2007 to March 2009, for example, the real value of the S&P Composite Index dropped by 50 percent.

Why does that put stock markets in the cross-hairs of totalitarian Democrats? Because stock prices, volatile and emotion-driven as they can be, represent real-world feedback about the effects of government policies. The fact that stock prices continued to rise throughout Trump’s presidency — despite modest corrections in 2018 and 2020 (the latter related to COVID-19) — was seen by many observers (though not Democrats, of course) as a sign of the success of Trump’s economic policies.

The next big correction — when it comes a week, a month, or a year from now — will be seen by many as real-world feedback about the economic destructiveness of Biden’s policies. The policies in question will include new and higher taxes; heavy handed re-regulation, especially to fight “climate change”; the initiation of vast and costly programs to fight “climate change”; the destabilization of civil order through tighter controls on policing and continued laxity in controlling riot by blacks and leftists; bailouts for Blue States and cities; and increases in “social” spending, including but not limited to the subsidization of hordes of recent and new immigrants from south of the border (of the kind formerly known as illegal).

At the first hint of a correction — perhaps even in anticipation of it — policy-makers in the Biden administration will use the power of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to throttle and “guide” stock trading. This will be done in the name of economic stability, of course, but the real aim will be to prevent or minimize a major correction in stock prices that would be seen, correctly, as real-world feedback about the destructiveness of Biden’s policies.