That’s especially true if the one giving off weak signals for banks in the middle is China rather than just Sweden or Japan. If that one goes into reverse, the pullback from it can become much more generalized. Sweden goes sour, get out of Sweden; China goes sour, get out of everything.
Chinese trade figures for December were bad. Again, this wasn’t unexpected since other markets had been signaling weakness ahead for months before; those obviously close to real fundamentals. Commodity prices had turned to minus signs indicating that market participants were reading real economy softness for some time. This is one chart I showed back in October:
