Stocks tremble as China weakens

Global markets had another tricky start to the week. On Tuesday, the FTSE 100 lost 3%, pan-European stocks lost 2.8% and US stocks tumbled by 3%.

Global markets had another tricky start to the week. On Tuesday, the FTSE 100 lost 3%, pan-European stocks lost 2.8% and US stocks tumbled by 3%, before recovering some poise mid-week. But the volatility in the oil market put equities in the shade. By the end of Monday the price had gained 27% in three days, the best such performance since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But on Tuesday it slid by around 8%. News that Chinese manufacturing had hit a six-year low in August unnerved investors, while the Chinese authorities stepped up their campaign to boost domestic shares, with scant success. They paraded a financial journalist on TV, who "confessed" to stoking market panic.

What the commentators said

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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.