Sorry, but I can’t join in the China panic

 MS Queen Victoria, 38°N 19°E

I’ll do my best, but I’ve got to be honest: being surrounded by shining Ionian waters and convivial Spectator cruisers isn’t helping me channel the panic that has gripped global markets. So forgive me if this dispatch doesn’t have the apocalyptic tone you’re expecting. I’m as irritated as anyone that contagion from China’s share-gambling epidemic has knocked my modest interest in FTSE100 stocks back to where it stood in late 2012, but ask yourself: do you know anything about China or the global economy today that you didn’t know a month ago?

Markets have overreacted, on relatively thin mid-August trading volumes, to a long-anticipated slowdown of Chinese industrial and consumer activity for which the collapse of the crazy Shanghai share boom, and ineffectual state attempts to stem the tide, have been taken as an alarm siren. Added to this is the fear that official interest rates must rise again soon. But we’ve known that for ages, too — and market turmoil may well be a reason for the US Fed to defer a rate hike (which may or may not have been imminent) for six months, especially since oil prices have also dropped to a six-year low, close to $40 a barrel, thereby further diminishing any threat of a return to inflation. In effect, investors have used the most drastic manoeuvre available to them — the blind stampede — to dissuade authorities from raising the price of money. Clearly there will be profound impacts, both from the dive in global investor confidence and the decline in China’s appetite for imported goods and services. It’s bad luck for Jaguar Land Rover, which accounts for a big chunk of UK automotive exports to China. It’s very bad luck for Glencore, the commodity-trading and mining giant that’s a major FTSE100 stock, and whose shares have plunged to less than a third of their 2011 flotation price.