Turning Point by John Francis Kinsella

Following emerging markets, like the Shanghai and Moscow, the Bombay stock exchange headed south. Since Barton’s dramatic sojourn in India just eight months previously its market had slumped a massive sixty percent. In the panic foreign investors rushed to plough their money into the last remaining safe haven — US Treasury bills. It seemed strange considering America was threatened with the worse depression in almost a century. At the same time yields fell to almost zero which in effect meant investors were paying Uncle Sam to look after their money.

  Some accused globalisation as governments struggled to come to terms with the realities of the economic crisis and rein in their huge deficits. Workers were feeling the heat even in China where riots had broken out in some regions, whole swaths of factories were forced to close down unable to survive as demand dropped and margins grew razor thin. Others pointed to the hastily expanded European Union, with Hungary and the Baltic countries looking as fragile as Iceland, forced to turn to the IMF for assistance.