If you’re going to panic, panic early. Markets are meant to be forward-looking mechanisms, but equity markets have taken their time to acknowledge the severity of the credit crisis.

The glib products of wishful thinking – that a localised problem in subprime mortgages would never infect broader asset classes, let alone the “real” economy; or that a newly resurgent Asia would effortlessly decouple from a sagging North America – have been shown to be pretty damaging.