• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, August 25, 2015

The U.S. stock market rout in recent days — call it a long-anticipated "correction,” a reaction to the economic slowdown in China, or both — has financial-services marcom types, money-beat columnists, quotable academics and a social-media sage or two working overtime to distribute the familiar scripts of “don’t panic” and “buy low.” In other words, we’ve been here before and we’ll be there again.

“The stock market is the only market where things go on sale and all the customers run out of the store,” investment manager Cullen Roche tweets, Matthew Yglesias reports on Vox in a piece urging investors to resist their urges to sell. 

“Sometimes, a lot of this is just short-term noise," Michael Kanigher, a managing director and private wealth advisor at UBS in Los Angeles tells the Los Angeles Times’ Samantha Masunaga. “In the long term, the market's going to recover and going to move higher. The economy's doing well.”

To be sure, yesterday was particularly rocky for market gazers everywhere following a week of tough going after China’s central bank “stunned the world” by devaluing its tightly controlled renminbi. As red-ink flowed, the day earned the “Black Monday” sobriquet in many headlines.

“Investors around the world watched in dizzying horror as China’s ‘Black Monday’ sparked global losses that wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off world markets,” observe Andrew Buncombe and David Usborne in The Independent. 

“With all the hand-wringing, however, many investment advisers have been urging clients to ignore the recent swings,” write Neil Gough, Chris Buckley and Nathaniel Popper for the New York Times. “And although a number of American companies stand to be hurt by any weakness in China, recent data has suggested that the economy in the United States is continuing to gain strength.”

Reassuring all those boomers watching their retirement portfolios plummet, a USA Today hed puts a Sixties-ish spin on the developments: “Don’t Freak.”

“Did the catastrophic market chaos of 1929 prove to be permanent? Did Black Monday in 1987 end up being the beginning of the end for wealth? Did October 2008 mark a ceiling for the stock market? Nope. Nope. And nope,” byPeter Dunn, aka Pete the Planner, writes in the piece below.

“Smartphones, light fixtures and cheap shoes aren’t the only thing made in China. The next global recession might be, too,” is Rana Foroohar’s lede on a Time story. But Foroohar goes on to write, “Many are wondering if the world is entering a period like the Asian financial crisis of 1997 or even, God forbid, the worldwide slowdown of 2008. I don’t think either is likely.” She then lays out four lessons to be noted in the wake of the crash.

NPR's Ari Shapiro relays the questions of listeners via social media to Austan Goolsbee, who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers earlier in the Obama administration and is now an economics professor at the University of Chicago. 

He points out some major differences between 2008 and 2015 — mainly that the root of the crises is in China and that “it’s just an equity bubble popping.” That’s bad if you own stock that’s spiral ling downward, of course, “but the destroying of banks leading to credit crunch and what the economists call systemic events largely don't happen just from equity bubbles. You've gotta have a lot of borrowing for that to happen.”

And if you’re selling anything tangible, you gotta believe that the U.S. consumer market isn’t going to tank. And the buy-low crowd will have its say. Indeed, “Wall Street set to rebound after massive selloff; futures rally 3%,” a MarketWatch hed put it at 5:04 a.m. this morning.

But, points out Sara Sjolin in the article below that hed, “U.S. investors will be faced with a raft of data on Tuesday that could dictate the trading direction,” including the Case-Shiller home-price index and FHFA house-price index for June, new home sales for July and consumer confidence for August.

Whatever. Don’t panic.