Complacency to chaos: how Covid-19 sent the world’s markets into freefall

Governments and investors woke up too late to the crisis. Now they are facing the deepest global recession in history

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For the global financial system, it has been a month of unprecedented pandemonium as the coronavirus pandemic breaks all records, bringing western capitalism to its knees as the disease spreads.

Major landmarks in global markets that typically take years to reach have fallen like dominos in a matter of hours and days. More than eight years of gains on the FTSE 100 have been wiped out in barely a month, with the index plummeting to its lowest level since 2011.