Sketchiness in the financial markets

The past week has been a really chaotic time in the financial markets.  Today is Thursday, August 27th, 2015, and the stock market as a whole has made huge gains today and yesterday.  Unfortunately, that came after huge losses on last Friday, Monday, and Tuesday.  Is this the long overdue correction to a bull market that's been rising fairly steadily since the bottom of the Great Recession in 2009?  Or is it signs of a new economic downturn?  The crazy part is that the "experts" on the financial news channel CNBC don't seem to know.  Some of the more technical indicators, like volatility, went to levels very rarely seen.  Most financial analysts seem to be hoping this is a market correction that will soon work itself out.  But the utter bewilderment of the majority of the professional investors and analysts definitely seems like cause for concern to me.  If the highly schooled, highly paid "experts" aren't sure where to put their money right now, what chance does the everyday 401k investor have?

I don't know what's going to happen.  The incredible growth in China's economy seems to be slowing down, at a time when most of the world is pretty slow already.  At the same time, many experts don't trust the economic numbers China puts out, so no one is really sure if the recent crash in the Chinese stock market is a correction, or a much bigger issue.  If China's economy continues to slow down in a major way, that will affect economies all over the world.  Some see China as an economic bubble that is beginning to burst.  Some see student loan debt in the U.S. as the next big bubble that will burst.  Many are worried about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates up from zero in September.  For over a decade now, interest rates have been historically low, which isn't good in the long run.

Whatever is happening to the global financial markets now is confusing the best minds in the financial world.  It does remind me of the 2008 crisis, where "experts" were saying early on that it's nothing to worry about and that sub-prime loans wouldn't have a big effect on the economy.  We know now that those people were wrong.  We also know that they told everyday investors to stay in the market and not sell stocks as stock prices continued to drop to historical lows.  We also know that a lot of people lost huge chunks of their retirement money during that crisis.  So what is the average investor to do right now?  No one seems to know.  Watch this space, it will probably get more interesting in the near future.