This week’s covers

We came into this week with one cover, but by the time we went to press, we had split the issue three ways. Early Monday morning, as share prices crashed in Tokyo, the markets were on our mind. Later that day, Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, fled her country, ending 15 years of increasingly autocratic rule. And by Tuesday, Britain was gripped by what seemed to us to have become its worst race riots since the second world war. All the while we were watching out for a catastrophic escalation of the fighting in the Middle East. Hardly the dog days of August.

Traders say that buying and selling in a crashing market is like catching a falling knife. It’s the same with market covers: you never know whether a plunge like the one we saw on Monday is just the beginning of the red ink or a passing scare. Fortunately, if there was no crash, we had a theme there in front of us, because the fundamental cause of the sell-off was anxiety about an American recession.