Following Black Friday when Americans lined up before dawn to hit the sales, Cyber Monday is the biggest internet shopping day of the year. And rush to the computers on Monday they did. Sadly, however, it was to hit the sell buttons on their share trading accounts, sending the S&P 500 tumbling 9 per cent and wiping out most of the gains from last week.

Who can blame them? Such was the bad news greeting investors returning from Thanksgiving that it is questionable whether the turkeys suffered the worse fate over the weekend. For starters there was the confirmation that the US economy is in recession. The body that officially decides these things (a recession is not two consecutive quarters of negative growth), the National Bureau of Economic Research, showing a thoroughness for which it is famed, finally pronounced that the bad times started in December last year.