After a dip and recovery yesterday, the markets were down this morning. It is clear that the developing situation between the U.S. and North Korea is rattling financial markets. Should we be worried? If so, what should we do?

Ten years ago today, the global financial system started to crack with the decision by the French bank BNP Paribas to block withdrawals from hedge funds that invested in U.S. mortgage securities. That, as we now know, led to a widening crisis of confidence over what securities were really worth, which in turn called into question the basic solvency of many financial institutions. Unable to know who was safe—or what collateral was worth—the financial system went into gridlock, leading to the crisis we have been recovering from ever since.

Today I’m going to discuss one of the major concerns out there: wage growth. Specifically, is what we’re seeing in terms of wage growth real or imaginary?

It’s a beautiful Friday in the middle of summer. I’ve spent the week examining investments and worrying over the future. Instead of more of the same, I thought we could take some time to think about how truly blessed we are right now.

Yesterday saw another new high for the Dow, as well as big bumps in the other indices. The only real news, and what I consider the driving factor for those highs, was that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen appeared a bit more dovish in her Congressional testimony than was expected. Given the low inflation we have seen, she said, the Fed is reserving the right to raise rates more slowly than it has previously indicated. Also, no time frame was given on starting to wind down the balance sheet. The result? Stocks proceeded to rally significantly. Think about that: with no real news about the fundamentals of corporate earnings or economic growth, a hint that the Fed might raise rates a bit more slowly drove stocks up.

The news this morning on the jobs report was much better than expected, with a strong June offsetting a weak May. This supports the idea that some of the weak data we’ve seen recently is just a summer slowdown, rather than something worse. And with consumer and business confidence still at high levels, prospects for the immediate future continue to look good.

To start, for those of you wondering exactly what the “VIX” is, formally, it is an index of expected volatility in the returns of the S&P 500 Index. It’s calculated based on the prices of eight different put and call options. If that doesn’t mean much, it might help to think of the VIX as a fear index. When the market tanks, the VIX rises; when the market is smooth—and expected to remain so—the VIX is low. In other words, low VIX equals low fear.

From our recent analysis, we can conclude that stock market risk is high. We can conclude that, even if things are different this time, they probably aren’t different enough to make a meaningful change in the outcome. And we can conclude that 2017 might well be 1999 all over again.

In several recent posts, I have made the case that today’s economy looks quite a bit like 1999—and that the markets may be setting up to look like 2000. Although this argument certainly seems reasonable, we have to ask ourselves how it could be wrong. Despite all the similarities, could it be different this time? If so, how? And what would that mean?

I concluded in yesterday’s post that there might well be a storm coming. So, the next question we need to answer is this: How will we know when the storm is about to hit?