While job growth has been solid this year, wages are rising barely faster than inflation, and the United States economy is producing far below its economic potential by most official estimates. Yet the stock market and other risky investments have generally been on tears since early in 2009, soaring to relatively high valuations relative to earnings. The Fed’s policies of printing trillions of dollars to buy bonds have been an important factor.

So the correction may not be about Wall Street knowing something about the outlook for the future that the rest of us do not, but rather about markets adjusting to more realistically reflect economic reality. Yes, things have improved, but maybe not enough to justify stock prices that are quite so high relative to corporate earnings.

“Due to excessive confidence in central banks, investors eagerly decoupled high market valuations from what was warranted by the sluggish fundamentals,” said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief economic adviser of Allianz, the financial services company. That disconnect, he said, has been undermined over the last few weeks by signs that the global economy’s fundamentals are weaker than they seemed and concern that the European Central Bank will not adequately fight that continent’s economic drift.

The renewed bout of volatility partly reverses a trend through the first half of the year in which almost all global assets — both safe ones like Treasury bonds and risky ones like stocks and real estate — were increasing in value. Now money is shifting out of risky assets and toward the safe ones, which is a more normal pattern.

There is a big question, though, as to what, if anything, global policy makers ought to do about it. Fed officials have been clear that they expect to start raising interest rates from their longstanding near-zero levels in the middle of 2015. Until this month, markets have believed them.

On Oct. 1, futures markets priced in only about 9 percent odds that the Fed would not raise rates by December 2015. By Wednesday, that had risen to about 40 percent. That means investors are now betting, given the recent declines in stock prices, bond yields and inflation expectations, that Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Fed, and her colleagues at the central bank are quite a bit less likely to follow through with their plans to increase interest rates next year. There have even been some early rumblings of a new round of quantitative easing, or bond buying (the previous round is set to end in the weeks ahead).