Fast and furious. That’s Donald Trump in his second term.

Whether you attribute the breakneck pace of… well, everything, to the GOP’s desire to achieve as much as possible before the midterms or an effort on the administration’s part to overwhelm the public’s capacity to process policy shifts (à la Steve Bannon’s “muzzle velocity” strategy), the result is a bewildering vortex. A typhoon of variability.

For an asset class that supposedly (famously) hates uncertainty, US equities have held up ok. Yes, the S&P plunged to the brink of a bear market in the wake of “Liberation Day,” but thanks to a series of capitulatory maneuvers and subtle folds which market participants crystallized into an acronym referencing Trump’s habit of “chickening out” in the face of stock losses and bond volatility, the benchmark reclaimed record highs. And in record time.

On Friday morning, when the S&P opened at a new peak, Bloomberg’s Cameron Crise noted that the rally off the post-“Liberation Day” lows counts as “the fastest-ever recovery from a 20% drop from intraday highs.”

The figure above gives you some context. It took just 57 trading days for the benchmark to rebound. That’s nearly twice as fast as the V-shaped recovery from the pandemic crash, although that selloff was deeper.

It’s worth noting that some of the calmer market commentary around the “Liberation Day” swoon suggested the sudden drop constituted an “event-driven bear market” as opposed to a “structural” or “cyclical” bear.

Some readers will recognize that as Goldman’s framing. The figures below, from the bank’s Peter Oppenheimer, show you how the different categories of bears differ in terms of length and time to recovery.

The takeaway, obviously, is that event-driven bears are much shorter and the time to “heal” much faster.

Oppenheimer published those charts the day before Trump announced his 90-day “pause,” which triggered a mind-bending stock rally.

If you’re curious as to historical examples of event-driven bear markets, the most famous such episode (certainly the most famous in modern market history) was LTCM, in 1998.

As Crise observed with some amusement on Friday, the length of the “Liberation Day” drawdown was 89 days, “exactly the same duration that we saw during LTCM.”