The people in denial are mostly retail traders who keep buying the dip, because they don't understand that the market has fundamentally changed. A lot of the big portfolios, at least the reasonably smart ones, have de-risked and are not eager to jump back in aggressively. But that also means that structural bid that had been underlying the market since 2020 is no longer present. And that means things can fall a lot further and quicker than most people who came into the market after 2020 can imagine.
Wall St is obligated to "buy the dip" is the thing - they're in it to make money now, so there's absolutely a ton of people trying to take a cut of the various market rebounds even if they have no confidence in the long run.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 [1], where a Republican majority enacted extreme tariffs against President Hoover's almost veto, is sometimes considered one of the smoking guns for how the Great Depression got so bad. That's quite a precedent to be concerned about here.
(Though this version is dumber with the President trying to do it through EOs, which is probably illegal and Congress should probably be much more upset their powers to be stupid are being usurped before their eyes.)
Well... if 2008 were an entirely self-inflicted wound caused by one malignant narcissist who believes himself to be a business genius despite the fact that his understanding of the global economy hasn't evolved since the 1980s or so (and it was already pretty shaky back then).
