A friend of mine emailed me a video file a few weeks ago in which six students, three in white shirts and three in black shirts, pass two basketballs around. You are very specifically instructed to count the number of passes that occur in one minute between the students wearing white shirts as all six students continually interweave and toss the basketballs around each other.

Global financial markets are under more stress than at any other time in the past seventy-five years and fear is the primary driver. The sharp declines in the stock markets worldwide capture the headlines, but the seizing of the credit markets are the core of the problem and probably the most challenging aspect of the crisis for the average investor to understand.

I have been witness to many financial market declines over the past two decades and while it is never easy to manage money through those periods, the one reassuring attribute of all those downdrafts is that they were, as we say in the business – “orderly”. However, on two occasions this past week, we were on the precipice of the market behavior becoming disorderly and that was indeed a scary prospect for me and all other financial market participants.