Wall Street faces a litany of fears right now, including whether this is a Nasdaq Y2K plunge rerun

Wall Street faces a litany of fears right now, including whether this is a Nasdaq Y2K plunge rerun

Anxiety and trauma sufferers are sometimes asked to define a hierarchy of fears that trigger distress so they might be managed. An anxious Wall Street faces a litany of fears right now that have shadowed the broad market on its way to a near-20% decline into Thursday's urgent sell-off and remain after Friday's strong and perhaps overdue 2.4% bounce. Nasdaq Y2K Crash Rerun? Of course, the crucial real-world economic swing factor is whether the ongoing inflation, consumer malaise and financial-condition tightening represent the overture to a recession in coming quarters. But from an investor's perspective, given the damage already done and the drivers of index performance and paper wealth, the top-ranked fear is that the Nasdaq tailspin is following the script from the post-peak bear market of 2000-2002. Without having foretold the kind of rapid selling storm of recent months, I've noted here early this year that there are just enough parallels to keep the worry flowing: Years of tech-stock dominance, heavy market concentration among a handful of digital-economy winners, star fund managers who embodied "new era" thinking while disdaining traditional valuation methods. And the cadence of the recent sell-off somewhat resembles the action after the March 2000 bubble top,