Stop the gamblers on stock market

The FTSE falls 5 percent. The pound collapses against the dollar in the biggest one-day fall since floating exchange rates began in 1971; oil prices are in free fall; Asian markets in near panic. What happened at weekend was dumbfounding.

Sure, there are problems in the real economy, but movements in the markets have been so violent that they are reinforcing the cycle of gloom and making moderately bad economic news seem like Armageddon. A decline of 0.5 percent in British GDP in a quarter should not make an already depressed the United Kingdom's stock market fall a further 5 percent.

Systemically unstable, but highly interconnected, the global financial system is accelerating the effect of news that the world could enter a simultaneous recession into a potential cataclysmic disaster.