Stocks stagger as end of party nears

Fears that the easy-money era is coming to an end has started to weigh on stock markets.

Stocks have stumbled badly in recent days. A sharp sell-off late last week left the Dow Jones index in the red for the year. The S&P 500 posted its worst weekly fall in two years, a slide of 2.6%. The pan-European FTSE Eurofirst 300 index slid by almost 3% last week to a four-month low.

Markets have been able to shrug off a wide array of problems so far this year, says Randall Forsyth in Barron's. These include China's banking system; the Isis insurgency in Iraq; the Ukraine crisis and sanctions on Russia; and Gaza. "Excluded from this list is the latest default by Argentina since, like the Chicago Cubs, anybody can have a bad century."

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.