Markets face stormy Wednesday
The Hong Kong Hang Seng index fell a chunky 4.3% this morning (Wednesday) and with Japan falling too on the yen appreciating the dollar, yesterday's gains (the FTSE100 rose over 100 points) look a long way away already.
It's a case of round up the usual suspects: oil rose to $99 a barrel, the US government-backed mortgage lender Freddie Mac announced it had lost $2bn in the last quarter and Peter Clarke, head of listed hedge fund Man Group said he expects one in 10 hedge funds to go bust.
When you think of the trillions of pounds these boys have under management, this is pretty frightening. Let's hope it's the small ones that go.
Shares in London set off south at a monstrous lick this morning and Europe will surely go the same way.
So is there any good news?
Nothing's going to happen until the US gets a grip on the mortgage crisis, as US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (an ex-Goldman Sachs boss) knows very well.
It looks as though the rescue fund launched by Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase is finally going to get off the ground as it's appointed Blackstone (49% owned by fellow sub-prime sufferer Merrill Lynch) as manager.
The US Federal Reserve will probably cut rates again sooner rather than later but the big problem is all those (relatively) cheap US mortgage deals that are about to run out and go rocketing up.
The Bush administration (not noted for its interventionist tendencies, domestically at least) is going to have to do something to put a floor under home repossessions.
Quite what, I have no idea.
Between a Rock and a hard place
Chancellor Alastair Darling was known for two things in his long stint as Transport Secretary: the ability to keep his head below the parapet through a policy of masterly inactivity and his loyalty to Gordon Brown.
Now in a few short months as Chancellor, he's been hit by the Northern Rock tsunami and Tuesday's revelation that some muppet at the very grand HM Revenue & Customs had put personal details of 25m child benefit claimers on a couple of computer disks and lost them.
In a couple of days' time, they'll probably discover that this unfortunate was an illegal immigrant.
Darling can't really be blamed for either of these; Northern Rock was an accident waiting to happen (could you refinance all your debts every six weeks?) and HMRC is clearly to blame for the latter (its head Paul Gray has had the decency to resign).
But the person it reflects badly on is former Chancellor, Prime Minister Brown so Darling will be shuffled off into the twilight zone as soon as Gordon can think of a successor.
In the meantime, the country is left with a Bank of England that screwed up the credit crunch by failing to inject liquidity rapidly into the markets (as the US Fed and the European Central Bank did), a Financial Services Authority which didn't seem to know what one of the biggest mortgage lenders was up to and a Treasury that is piling up the sandbags in Horse Guards and crying, "don't panic".
HP brings home the dollars
It's only 70 years since America was mired in one of longest and worst recessions ever experienced in the west. Then came FDR and the New Deal and, more importantly, World War Two when US industry switched into overdrive and proceeded to take over the post-war world through the 1950s and 60s.
US industry has been declining (in relative terms) since the oil price spike of the 1970s but the current low level of the greenback is giving a mega-boost to US manufacturers, not least PC maker HP.
Yesterday, HP confirmed a 28% rise in quarterly profits to $2.2bn and announced that it saw no reason why this progress should not be continued into 2008.
It's only a few years since high profile CEO Carly Fiorina was turfed out of the company as investors doubted the wisdom of its merger with Compaq.
No one doubts the contribution of current CEO Mark Hurd, but Ms Fiorina's fate indicates only too clearly that financial analysts don't get the 'vision thing.'
Fiorina saw that the company needed some high-end computer expertise to go with the printers and scanners and she's been proved right.
And HP is now the biggest PC maker in the world.
With the dollar scraping the bottom it's going to get even bigger and lots of other one-time American basket cases (like its car industry) are going to do the same.
Even Ford might make a profit next year.
So while lots of people (mostly outside America) are agonising about the low level of the dollar (not least because it pushes up the price of oil, which you buy in dollars) some American industrialists are doing very nicely thank you.
The dollar will recover in time. But in the meantime US industry is getting a World War Two-type boost.
Stephen Foster is a former news editor of 北京赛车pk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.