Corporate profits are falling back to a more normal pace (absent some nightmare scenario intruding).

No doubt about it: Earnings growth is decelerating. But maybe that’s simply to be expected, a reversion to the mean—and hardly a catastrophe. This is because, in a mid- to late-cycle for the economy (depending how you define where the economy is), numerous Wall Street strategists say, rip-snorting corporate earnings advances tend to peter out.

S&P 500 net income for 2021’s final quarter, whose reporting is almost complete, has gone up 29.1%, around the same level as in 2018, although far below the dazzling showings seen last year. The current economic and market uptrends began either in 2009, at the end of the Great Recession, or 2015, when growth temporarily faltered amid surging oil prices.

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