Black Monday: A storm in a teacup?

Many investors were horrified by Black Monday's sharp falls in the stockmarkets. But the jitters seem unlikely to lead to a bear market yet.

"August does seem to specialise in episodes of market turmoil," says Economist.com's Buttonwood blog. August 1998 saw Russia's default; August 2007 was when the subprime crisis really started to bite; and four years later the eurozone crisis threatened to spread across the region's peripheral nations.

This time, European stocks have suffered their worst August since 2011, with the pan-European FTSE Eurofirst 300 index down 9%.

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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.