Probably the biggest financial crisis of all time

At this juncture, my best credit-crunch advice is to keep beside your armchair at all times an atlas of the world, a modern American dictionary and a bottle of whisky. If your constitution is strong, you might also want a copy of the Financial Times but do keep the television zapper handy, so you can hit the ‘mute’ button when the news comes on.

You can tell from the order of the silent pictures whether markets have plunged or rallied, which is really as much as you want to know. If the first shots to appear are of Russell Brand or yachts at anchor off Corfu, it has been a relatively good day for your savings. If it’s stock footage of traders mouthing the word ‘carnage’ or forests of estate agents’ For Sale signs, you know your net worth has just taken another terrible kicking. As for the voices you’ve chosen not to listen to, most of them are just guessing and extrapolating from extreme and unprecedented short-term market events: as I’ve said here before, no one really knows where this is going.

But if you do turn the sound up, you need the dictionary to explain words like ‘deleveraging’, which means reducing debt levels for every kind of borrower, including governments, financial institutions and individuals, and is going to have to happen everywhere; and ‘decoupling’, which means disconnecting yourself from the fate of the American economy, and doesn’t seem to be happening anywhere. If you want to grasp how those two concepts interact with markets, politics and real-world economic activity, the FT and the atlas are by far your best daily guide, and the whisky your only solace.