Forget China or oil prices. This crash was made in America

If anyone is feeling pleased about the slide on the stock-market today, it is probably Andrew Roberts, the RBS analyst who hit the headlines this week with a note advising everyone to ‘sell everything’. Probably rather sooner than he expected, and before any of his clients even had time to panic properly, prices have started to collapse. Almost every day, there are hefty three digits falls, and pictures editors are running out of their stock photos of despairing traders looking glumly into their Bloomberg terminals.

The numbers suggest that a bear market, usually defined as a 20 percent drop off the highs, is now very close. China’s Shenzhen index is already there. The FTSE is down from just shy of 7,000 in July to 5,780 now. The S&P 500 has fallen from 2,135 to less than 1,900. As if the Germans were not already feeling gloomy enough, their key index, the DAX, has been hit the hardest, dropping from 12,300 last July to 9,500 now.