In the U.S., the Dow Jones plummeted 1,000 points at the opening bell, before recovering much of its value. It was just 200 points down at midday but the afternoon brought another market swoon. It finished down 3.8 percent. U.S. stocks are in correction territory, which means they’ve lost 10 percent of their value from their high. Brenda Kelly, head analyst of the London Capital Group, added a bit of dark humor to the Black Monday talk after the limit was hit, tweeting: “Can someone just close the stock markets?”

The poor performance is apparently tied at least in part to the Chinese stock market. According to Bloomberg Business, the Shanghai Stock Exchange was down 8.5 percent on Monday, the steepest fall since February 2007.

A sense of panic was felt in many other global markets, including the STOXX Europe and FTSEuroFirst. The European stocks had their worst day since 2009, the Guardian reported.

The Nikkei 225 index in Japan reached its lowest level since late February of this year, CNBC reported.

“Markets are afraid of further economic weakness in China, further pain in global commodity markets and uncertain about Fed and People’s Bank of China policy—what they will do and what the impact will be,” a global strategist at Societe Generale, Kit Juckes, explained to CNBC. “The divergence between global commodity prices and equities is not a new theme but the danger now is that they begin to re-correlate—as they did when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and what had previously been an emerging market crisis became a U.S. recession.”

At least one person of note is preparing for the worst: Damian McBride, an adviser to Gordon Brown during the last crisis, suggested stockpiling “hard cash” and not assuming banks would be open. He also suggested getting plenty of bottled water, canned food and “other essentials at home to live a month indoors.” But McBride’s fears are not resonating throughout the entire financial sector.