The US “soft patch” in mid year followed a brief period when price statistics in the US had people worried about inflation. The number one topic of discussion the previous year, of course, had been deflation. There were also periodic concerns that the attempts to engineer a slowdown in China might over-achieve, resulting in a slump of global significance.
The various short-term concerns were overdone, as is so often the case, but were to be expected given that an innumerable army of analysts, commentators and financial market players extensively debate every twist and turn of the economic data, many of which turn out to be statistical noise.