The eurozone crisis only gets worse. All eyes turn to Paris last weekend as finance ministers from the Group of 20 club of powerful nations meet to try to thrash out a solution, amid further downgrades of sovereign debt.
Meanwhile, in the US, long-run unemployment appears to be embedded, the president’s approval ratings are falling through the floor and the frontrunner to oppose him next year is brandishing an apparently unworkable plan to overhaul the nation’s tax code.
All of this is deep reason for concern. Yet investors’ greatest fear, which drove the summer swoon in world stock markets, lies to the east. The fulcrum of the axis of anxiety has shifted to China.