As the panic fades, investors’ nerves are still jangling. For the time being, stockmarkets have stopped convulsing and the prices of American Treasury bonds are no longer in freefall. Yet share indices across America, Asia and Europe have hardly recovered their poise (see chart 1); instead, day-to-day drops of one percent or more have become unremarkable. The VIX index—Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, which measures expected volatility using the market price of insurance against it—has fallen from its nerve-shredding peak reached a fortnight ago. It is nevertheless at a level last seen in 2022, amid a grinding bear market (see chart 2). The price of gold has been breaking record after record. Investors, in other words, are offloading risk wherever they can and preparing for a drawn-out slump.
