The seven fears of the markets

“For two years it seemed to be getting better, but pessimism has returned to the financial markets”, writes Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant after the Amsterdam Exchange Index (AEX) closed at the lowest point in a year on 16 October: 376.27 points, a drop of 0.9 percent. The CAC 40 (Paris) and FTSE 100 (London) both lost 0.5 percent.
As De Volkskrant explains —

Share prices went up 17 percent last year, and continued to rise in the first six months of this year. Shareholders took an advance on economic recovery. But their anticipations have reached a dead end due to a report by the IMF [International Monetary Fund] that showed a third recession had to be taken into account. [...] The pessimistic expectations of the IMF were immediately backed up by poor results in the German economy.

The Dutch newspaper attributes the pessimism to seven factors: possible recession in the eurozone, deflation, the threat of Ebola, fears of a new euro crisis, divisions in the eurozone over the policy of the European Central Bank, financial unrest in the United States and China and “the most trivial reason: when the autumn leaves fall down, the financial markets are often in a crisis. The historical crashes of the financial markets of 1929 and 1987 took place in the month October.”