Asian Markets Sink on US Debt Downgrade, London Burns

Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index currently down 788 points (it was worse), or down almost 3.9% (from Yahoo Finance):

Shanghai Composite down 4%
Singapore Strait Times Index down 4.2%
Jakarta down 4.3%
Seoul down 4%
BSE 2.5%

Relatively modest loss ("relative" is the keyword) are:
Australia's All Ordinary down 1.8%
Japan's Nikkei down 2.1%

Gold (spot) hit the record high of $1,703.50 (from kitco.com).

US market futures are down, but off the low (from bloomberg.com):
Dow futures down 250
S&P futures down 27
Nasdaq futures down 46

In Europe, FTSE futures down 99. There was a report of riots in London.

While I was busy reporting the end of the world as the Japanese knew it, the world as the rest of the world had known ever since October 2008 was slowly getting unhinged, and now it is visibly, acceleratingly, irreversibly unhinged.

The US Federal Reserve will hold the FOMC meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, and some analysts think the Fed has no choice but declare QE3 (and 4, 5, 6, .....n), mostly because there's not much else they could do. Why they should do anything is another question, but the justification for carrying out QE2 (from November 2010 to June 2011) was to give the US government "a break" so that the government has time to shape up and do something about the economy that was decelerating. Of course nothing happened.

The PPT and the NY Fed have a work cut out for them before the US market opens.

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