Traders were still digesting the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s last meeting on interest rates, and they weren’t sitting well since they said that a more ‘prolonged’ and ’severe’ downturn could not be ruled out.

Meanwhile, the IMF is putting the chance that global economic growth will drop to recession levels in 2008 and 2009 at one in four. If the financial markets were a twin-engine plane, both engines would be on fire, the agency said.

The IMF is now projecting world economic growth will slow to a 3.7% rate in 2008, down from 4.2% forecast previously, and it says that we will have to depend on the emerging economies, particularly China and India, to prop up the global economy.