A storm is brewing in financial markets

London

AFTER a year in which world markets have sailed effortlessly through wars, invasions and geopolitical ferment, a storm of their own making may well be brewing. Investors have mostly held their nerve as headlines lurched from a new Cold War in eastern Europe to conflict and Western intervention in the Middle East, the threatened breakup of the United Kingdom and secessionist risks in Europe.

More prosaic "shocks" - a weather-related first-quarter slump in the United States, grinding deflationary angst in Europe and China's spluttering, unnerving slowdown - have largely been shrugged off too.