Wall Street tumbles, Dow confirms bear market

The S&P 500 returned 30.43% and not that much fuss was made about it - except for 'best economy ever'. Now 20% down is the end of the world and the US administration is floating gigantic tax cuts - so much for price discovery and 'free markets'.

It seems like an arbitrary threshold. It’s not like magically the market as soon as it crosses this arbitrarily defined line, we can now officially call it a “Bear market”.

On Monday, the market plunged but just shy of the bear market line. Today, it crosses it. I would have said it’s a bear market already because we can see somewhat into the future what’s gonna happen.

Does anyone know what heuristics go into determining this threshold?