If there were any glimmers of light amid Tuesday’s dreadful news, few saw them. From the awful results that forced Citigroup to cut its dividend, to bad US retail sales figures that deepened fears of recession in the world’s biggest economy, to the ZEW survey showing German business confidence at a 15-year low, bad news was everywhere.

But the resurgence of the yen is potentially the scariest news of all. It dropped below Y107 to the dollar for the first time since June 2005. This broke a trend of steadily weakening against the dollar that had been happening since 1994, according to Nomura.