Crime Is Falling Across the West. Why the Bank of America Bear Signal Now
On 11 June 2026, two stories arrived in the same news cycle and pointed in opposite directions. The first, summarised in a Telegram wire from Epoch Times at 11:04 UTC, reported a broad decline across the major crime categories in the United States — with the single exception of assaults involving a dangerous weapon. The second, posted to X by Unusual Whales at 23:31 UTC on 10 June, flagged that Bank of America's proprietary bull-and-bear market indicator had just tripped to 70% bearish — the kind of trigger the bank's own analysts have historically associated with a moment when "it is time to take profit." Read separately, each is a small data point. Read together, they describe the strangest feature of the post-2024 economy: the streets are calmer, the screens are not.
The point of this piece is not to argue that a bear signal is wrong. Bank of America's indicator has a track record, and the bank's strategists are entitled to read it as they do. The point is to ask why an indicator that has, in past cycles, been treated as a useful proxy for the real economy is now flashing red at precisely the moment that the real economy's most visible disorder — violent street crime — is in retreat. Something has decoupled. What it has decoupled from is the interesting question.
What the crime data actually says
The Epoch Times summary, posted to Telegram at 11:04 UTC on 11 June, drew on a published piece (linked at theepochtim.es/3g2xqc) reporting that major crime categories in the United States have moved lower in aggregate, with one specific exception: assault with a dangerous weapon. The framing is consistent with what the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program and the Major Cities Chiefs Association have shown since 2023 — homicides down sharply from their pandemic peak, robbery trending lower, motor-vehicle theft falling back from its 2020-2022 surge. The exception is itself instructive: it is precisely the category most associated with interpersonal confrontation involving firearms, edged weapons, or vehicles used as weapons, and it is the category most likely to be amplified by a media ecosystem that rewards specificity over trend.
A second Epoch Times item, also at 11:04 UTC, sat adjacent to the first: a separate note on a legal settlement context, in which a 2024 proposed $30 billion deal had been rejected as insufficient. The two items are linked in the wire only by timing and placement. Read in isolation, the settlement story belongs to a different story — corporate liability, the politics of tort reform. Read in the same hour as the crime story, it sharpens a question about how the cost of disorder is being priced: if the streets are getting cheaper, why are the courts and the capital markets acting as if disorder is more expensive?
The honest answer, supported by what the wire says and what it does not, is that the wire does not say. It reports the headline number, the exception, and the adjacent settlement story. It does not adjudicate between them. The work of adjudication — of deciding which number deserves the front page — falls to the editors, the analysts, and the readers.
What the Bank of America signal actually says
The Unusual Whales post, timestamped 23:31 UTC on 10 June 2026, summarised Bank of America's own published take: that the bank's proprietary bull-and-bear market indicator had crossed a threshold (described in the linked Unusual Whales piece as the 70% bear mark) that has, in the bank's own framing, historically been a moment when it is "time to take profit." The underlying URL — unusualwhales.com/news/bofa-70-percent-bear-market-signals-triggered — is the only document the wire provides; the indicator's exact construction is the bank's own proprietary blend of breadth, volatility, and positioning data, and Unusual Whales is reporting the bank's reading of it rather than constructing an alternative.
There is a useful distinction to draw here between a signal and a forecast. A signal is what an indicator says now, given its own internal logic. A forecast is what an analyst is willing to bet on. The Bank of America team is, in the wire's telling, doing the first. They are saying: the indicator has crossed a line that, in their own historical back-tests, has often been the right moment to derisk. They are not — at least not in the Unusual Whales summary — saying that the indicator has never been wrong, or that this time is the same as last time. That kind of nuance is what the analyst note is for, and the analyst note is the kind of document a reader cannot fully evaluate without reading the original.
Why the two stories should not be in the same paragraph — but are
The instinct of a clean editorial process is to keep the crime story on the local page and the market story on the business page. That instinct is defensible. A newsroom's job is not to manufacture rhyme. But the two stories are in the same wire hour for a reason the wire does not state: the people who write the market memo and the people who write the crime memo are reading the same macro signal in opposite directions. One group sees an economy that is, by its most visible measure, becoming more orderly. The other group sees an asset-price complex that is, by its own most-watched indicator, becoming more disordered. Both can be right at the same time, because they are not measuring the same thing.
This is the structural frame the wire does not supply, and that an editorial analysis has to construct from the pieces available. The crime statistics are a measure of physical disorder in a specific geography, at a specific price in human welfare. The Bank of America indicator is a measure of financial disorder in a specific asset class, at a specific price in portfolio welfare. They share an input — the underlying economy — but they are sensitive to different things. Crime moves slowly, lags demography, and reflects what actually happens on the pavement. The bear-signal indicator moves fast, reflects positioning, and reacts to what traders think will happen on the pavement. The pavement has been getting calmer. The traders are not yet convinced.
What this says about the post-2024 economy, in plain prose
The mainstream read on the post-2024 US economy has been that it is a story of two trajectories: real activity stabilising while financial conditions tighten. The mainstream read is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The crime data is one of the few windows into the real-economy side of the split that is not contaminated by the political framing that has, since 2024, attached itself to every other measure — inflation, employment, housing, migration. Crime statistics are reported by local police departments, aggregated by the FBI, summarised by wire services, and read by analysts who do not, by professional habit, bring a partisan lens to the Uniform Crime Reporting tables. They are, in that narrow sense, the cleanest signal available. And the cleanest signal available says: things are, on the margin, less violent than they were.
The Bank of America signal is, by contrast, one of the dirtiest signals available — not because the bank's analysts are careless, but because any indicator that aggregates positioning, breadth, and volatility is, by construction, measuring what market participants think about the future. Market participants are entitled to their pessimism. They are not, however, entitled to claim that their pessimism is itself a measurement of the world. It is a measurement of the world's price. The two can diverge for a long time, and have, in past cycles, done so.
The structural point, then, is that an economy can be improving on the dimension that matters most to the people who live in it (whether they can walk down the street) and deteriorating on the dimension that matters most to the people who own assets in it (whether their portfolio is correctly positioned for the next twelve months). Both groups are, in a meaningful sense, looking at the same country. They are reading different columns of the same spreadsheet.
Stakes — who wins, who loses, and over what horizon
If the crime data continues on its current trajectory — broad categories lower, assault with a dangerous weapon the stubborn exception — the winners are, in the first instance, the residents of the cities where the trend is steepest. The losers are the local news ecosystem that has, since 2020, monetised the perception of disorder and will have to find a different story; the cycle of reinvestment in urban cores that had been priced for continued disorder; and the political coalitions that built durable majorities on the promise that the streets were never going to calm down.
If the Bank of America signal is right, the winners are the holders of cash and short-duration Treasuries who rotated before the indicator crossed. The losers are the late-cycle equity holders who read the crime data, concluded that the real economy was fine, and stayed long. The horizon on which the bank's signal is typically evaluated is six to twelve months; the horizon on which the crime data moves is closer to a decade. The two horizons are not, in any honest framing, comparable. The market is a clock; the streets are a calendar.
What the sources do not say — and where the evidence thins
It is worth being plain about the limits of the wire that prompted this piece. The Epoch Times summary does not specify which FBI release it is drawing on, does not name the cities that drove the broad decline, and does not adjudicate between competing definitions of "major crime categories." The Unusual Whales post does not reproduce the Bank of America analyst note in full, does not specify the date on which the bank's indicator crossed 70%, and does not include a counter-indicator from another major bank for triangulation. The settlement story linked in the same wire hour is mentioned in the same breath as the crime story by editorial accident rather than by structural connection.
A reader who wants a fuller picture would need to pull the underlying FBI release, the full BofA note, the previous quarter's bear-signal readings and the asset returns that followed, and at least one independent cross-check on the assault-with-a-dangerous-weapon category — which is the single most likely place for measurement error to distort the trend. None of those documents are in the wire this article is built on. They are the next step, not this one.
The honest summary, then, is this: in the same news hour on 11 June 2026, the United States was reported to be getting less violent and its largest bank was reported to be reading the markets as 70% bearish. Both can be true. Both are, in fact, almost certainly true. The interesting question is not which is right; it is why an economy that is calming down on the ground is being priced by its banks as if it were about to break.
This publication's framing inverts the usual ordering. Wire coverage tends to lead on the market signal and treat the crime data as colour; Monexus treats the crime data as the more durable, harder-to-fake input, and reads the bear signal as a measurement of mood rather than of fact. The next step is the primary documents — the FBI release, the BofA note — and the triangulation that follows from them.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/TSN_ua
- https://t.me/CryptoBriefing