Easy for you to say.

Question: In a market panic, what happens to asset prices, in general?

We wager that even the most casual observer can deduce the answer.

However, if you have a PhD from Columbia university, like Lisa Borland, PhD, Evnine and Associates, you would say it this way:

...A significant anti-correlation between dispersion and cross-sectional kurtosis is found such that dispersion is high but kurtosis is low in panic times, and the opposite in normal times. The co-movement of stock returns also increases in panic times. We define a simple statistic s, the normalized sum of signs of returns on a given day, to capture the degree of correlation in the system. s can be seen as the order parameter of the system because if s = 0 there is no correlation (a disordered state), whereas for s different from 0 there is correlation among stocks (an ordered state).

Talk like this gets you a half a million a year on Wall Street.