Can you feel the panic in the air? CNN Money’s Fear & Greed Index measures the amount of fear in the financial world on a scale from 0 to 100. The closer it is to zero, the higher the level of fear. Last Monday, the index was sitting at a reading of 36. As I write this article, it has fallen to 7. The financial turmoil which began last week is threatening to turn into an avalanche. On Sunday night, we witnessed the second largest one day stock market collapse in China ever, and this pushed stocks all over the planet into the red. Meanwhile, the twin blades of an emerging market currency crisis and a commodity price crash are chewing up economies that are dependent on the export of natural resources all over the globe. For a long time, I have been warning about what would happen in the second half of 2015, and now it is here. The following is a summary of the financial carnage that we have seen over the past 24 hours…
-On Sunday night, the Shanghai Composite Index plunged 8.5 percent. It was the largest one day stock market crash in China since 2007, and it was the second largest in history. The Chinese government is promising to directly intervene in order to prevent Chinese stocks from going down even more.
-Over 1,500 stocks in China fell by their 10 percent daily maximum. This list includes giants such as China Unicom, Bank of Communications and PetroChina.
-Ever since peaking in June, the Shanghai Composite Index has dropped by a total of 28 percent.
-Even Chinese stocks that are listed on U.S. stock exchanges are being absolutely hammered. The following comes from USA Today…
The 144 China-based stocks with primary listings on major U.S. exchanges have erased nearly $40 billion in paper wealthsince the Shanghai Composite index peaked on June 12. It’s an enormous destruction of wealth that in effects wipes out the market value of a company the size of cruise ship operator Carnival.
