The S&P 500 has begun 2016 with its worst performance ever. This has prompted Wall Street apologists to come out in full force and try to explain why the chaos in global currencies and equities will not be a repeat of 2008. Nor do they want investors to believe this environment is commensurate with the Dot.Com Bubble that caused the NASDAQ to plummet 78% and the S&P 500 to shed 35% of its value. In fact, they claim the current turmoil in China is not even comparable to the 1997 Asian Debt Crisis: when dollar-denominated debt loads couldn’t be repaid and the Thai baht lost half its value, and the stock market dropped 75%.

Indeed, the unscrupulous individuals that dominate financial institutions and governments seldom predict a down-tick on Wall Street, so don’t expect them to warn of the impending global recession and market mayhem. But a recession has occurred in the U.S. about every five years on average since the end of WWII; and it has been seven years since the last one—we are overdue. Most importantly, the average market drop during the peak to trough of the last 6 recessions has been 37%. That would take the S&P 500 down to about 1,300; if this next recession were to be just of the average variety.

But this one will be worse.

A major contributor for this imminent recession is the fallout from a faltering Chinese economy. The megalomaniac communist government has increased debt 28 times since the year 2000. Taking that total north of 300% of GDP in a very short period of time for the primary purpose of building a massive unproductive fixed asset bubble. Now that this debt bubble is unwinding, growth in China is going offline. The renminbi’s falling value, cascading Shanghai equity prices (down 40% since June 2014) and plummeting rail freight volumes (down 10.5% y/y), all clearly illustrate that China is not growing at the promulgated 7%, but rather isn’t growing at all. The problem is China accounted for 34% of global growth, and the nation’s multiplier effect on emerging markets takes that number to over 50%. Therefore, expect more stress on multinational corporate earnings as global growth continues to slow.