The weekly newsletter sent out on Friday by Fathom, a London-based economic consultancy, said it all. “It’s getting really ugly out there,” it said. “It may be true that we have passed the first phase of this crisis, but that does not mean the next phase will not be worse, perhaps very much worse.”

The investors reading those dire warnings will already have spent their week seeing a heap of evidence piling up that the economic crisis is spreading around the world. Record after grim record was broken in the financial markets, as long-term interest rates sank to their lowest for decades, in some cases their lowest ever.