It's as if all that market mayhem didn't even happen

It's been quite the wild ride for markets.

After their worst week in four years, stocks started Monday deep in the red. The Dow plummeted 1,089 points before recovering some of its losses that day. And the S&P officially slipped into "correction territory," defined as a 10% decline from recent highs.

All the major US indices fell over 3% by that day's end.

Tuesday initially felt like a breath of fresh air as markets opened sharply higher - but then, with 30 minutes of trading left to go, the Dow and the S&P went red for the day.

The ups-and-downs continued through Wednesday and Thursday (although to a less extreme degree), before settling into a nice calm with minimal volatility on Friday.

But even with the insane and un-predicable moves, perhaps the most shocking thing about this week was that the S&P 500 and the Dow are actually trading modestly higher today, compared to last Friday's close.

By only about 0.6% and 0.8%, respectively. But higher, nonetheless.

"US good. Rest of the world not good." - Torsten Slok, Deutsche Bank

There was mayhem in markets around the world. Many analysts attributed some of the volatility in US markets to developments abroad - underscoring that the US economy is doing relatively well right now.

Some went even further and crowned China as the catalyst of this week's mayhem, starting with insane sell-off on "Black Monday." (As a somewhat interesting aside, volatility in the US markets decreased after Chinese stocks staged a massive rally on Thursday, and continued to rally on Friday.)

But as you can see in this chart from Deutsche Bank's Torsten Slok, the global markets in aggregate aren't far from where they've been for months, which arguably makes any explanation for the sell-off moot.

So, did anything worth remembering actually happen this week? Is this week doomed to be forgotten?

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