Chris will be writing more about this, I suspect, when he wakes up in Paris in a few hours. From the NYT:
Fears that the United States may be in a recession reverberated around the world on Monday, sending stock markets from Mumbai to Frankfurt into a tailspin and puncturing the hopes of many investors that Europe and Asia would be able to sidestep an American downturn....Atrios also has a ton of posts this evening about the markets plunging around the world. Check them out.
As exchanges opened on Tuesday in Asia, the decline only seemed to accelerate. Markets in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and Seoul, South Korea, all fell farther in the opening hours of trading than they had all day on Monday. The Hong Kong market plunged another 7.22 percent by late morning after tumbling 5.49 percent on Monday. In Tokyo, the Nikkei hit a low not seen since September 2005.
Monday’s sell-off was evenly distributed from east to west. The DAX index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange plummeted 7.2 percent, its steepest one-day decline since Sept. 11, 2001. The 7.4 percent drop in the Sensex index in Mumbai was the second-worst single-day tumble in its history.
Stocks followed suit when markets opened in the Western Hemisphere. Canadian stocks were down nearly 5 percent, and a key market index in Brazil was off 6.6 percent.
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