Last month, citing the need to exercise greater control over national mineral resources, Ecuador suspended exploration and revoked a series of mining concessions. Late this week, Venezuela banned open-pit mining, and halted all activity in the vast Imataca reserve, which includes the town of El Dorado in the remote south-eastern part of the country.

It is not about regulation and de-regulation, as Washington lawmakers would like you to believe. It is also not about the inability to control derivative transactions, as self-styled experts are claiming on your television sets. In fact, if the facts are closely scrutinized, the alarm bells are all ringing the wrong jagged tune. What we are facing today is the complete lack of comprehension of the very nexus which triggered the most remarkable phase of capital accumulation following the Second World War.

Recent facts from the emerging markets demand that American corporations conduct a fundamental review of the nature, quality and behaviour of their offshore assets. And stock analysts recommending long positions in American companies with significant overseas income flows need to recognize that the cyclical case for equities is no longer a valid proposition.

The turmoil in the global economy has serious implications for growth corporations in the emerging markets. Rather than assessing corporate capital raising exercises from within the rational prism of the credibility (or otherwise) of business models, the markets are simply assigning sharply widened, and unreasonable, risk spreads on an across-the-board basis.

The fact that rating agencies are struggling to come to grips with the seemingly unending stream of guidance reports from the corporate and sovereign sectors can by itself justify an unequivocal sell-on-rallies market call. Because hardly any of the recent reports in the public domain have been founded in a sustainable interpretation of the size and length of the global recession.