There goes our sense of perspective

The day before Black Monday (2008 version), the Sunday Telegraph was already preparing its readers for hard times ahead. They would, it advised, have to take their shoes to "the mender" (what happened to cobblers?), wash clothes in cold water, eat scrag-end of lamb, root vegetables and mackerel, and turn over old cuffs and collars. On the other hand, Independent on Sunday readers were told by the economics columnist Hamish McRae that he had been to Stockholm and found everybody cheerful.

It's hard for newspapers to know how they should respond to stock market crashes and threats of recession. Should they follow their usual instincts - as they do in stories about weather, disease or terrorists - and joyfully hype up the impending doom, thus (they hope) boosting sales? Or should they, mindful of how downturns damage advertising-dependent newspapers, to say nothing of their owners, play down the dangers? After all, during the last significant recession, one newspaper proprietor jumped off his yacht and drowned.

At the Financial Times, which stands to lose more than most from a recession, the mood as stock markets slumped and American banks turned to foreign governments for support was near to hysteria. Perhaps the FT wanted to echo the mood among its core readers in the City. Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator, feared for "the political legitimacy of the market economy itself". health club John Plender was haunted by visions of the "deflationary nightmare that has confronted Japan since 1990". The financier George Soros, writing on the op-ed page, screamed that the crisis could be "more severe than any since the Second World War", while a contributor from the Yale School of Management trembled at the prospect of "a transformation" comparable to the switch from feudalism to capitalism.

At the Guardian, schadenfreude was in the ascendant. "It is state intervention that is keeping the market economy afloat," wrote Seumas Milne. Jonathan Freedland thought "current convulsions . . .health club suggest turbo-capitalism is not just unfair, it is dishonest and dangerous". In the Independent, Andreas Whittam Smith thought "the big question" was whether "market capitalism already exhibits the features that will lead to its replacement".

It is hard to believe Whittam Smith was writing about the same events as the Times's Anatole Kaletsky. On January 14, as the FTSE stood at just over 6200, Kaletsky assured readers the global credit crisis "is almost over" and "there will be no US recession". As for stock markets, they "will rise in 2008".

Was Kaletsky embarrassed 10 days later, with the FTSE well below 6000 and everybody expecting a US recession? He would admit only that "events have moved faster than I expected" and he slid craftily from predicting no US recession to predicting no world recession. Nor did McRae repent of his earlier optimism. He drew a distinction between what happens in stock markets and what happens in "the real economy". In the latter, he insisted, "everything points to a slowdown rather than a collapse".

It is, of course, grossly unfair to expect Wolf, Plender, Kaletsky, McRae or any other commentator to predict the course of events accurately. If they could do so, they wouldn't be Fleet Street hacks, but multi-billionaires, and we all know the jokes about six economists having 12 opinions. health club It may seem rash of Kaletsky to dismiss Soros - who actually is a multi-billionaire because of his success in judging markets correctly - as "unequivocally wrong". But it's second nature for speculators (even retired ones) to predict big price falls because that's when they buy (or bought) cheap assets. Besides, Kaletsky and McRae could still be proved right, particularly now it's been revealed the crash may have been provoked by a rogue trader in Paris.

As the former Economist editor Bill Emmott observed in the Guardian on Friday, "stock market traders are wild, emotional creatures" - like journalists, he might have added - "and we risk going mad if we try to understand their every move".

Where does that leave newspaper readers? Ownership of shares and other tradeable assets - either directly or indirectly through pension funds and so on - is far more widespread than it was, say, 30 years ago. Readers, at times like this, are desperate for good advice. But if they turn to economics and City commentators, they will be relying on people who are on the borderline of insanity, if you believe Emmott.

The truth is that the commentators are best read, not perhaps as you would read the astrologists, but certainly as you would read the sports reporters trying to predict whether Manchester Utd will beat Arsenal. Interesting - fun, health club even - but not to be taken very seriously. To adapt the old putdown of sports writers, most economics commentators are fans of capitalism with typewriters.

The redtops, on the whole, took a calmer approach to Black Monday than the upmarket papers. On Tuesday, the Mirror had only one low-key story on page 12. And on Wednesday, the Sun's leader announced: "Global markets are in turmoil. . . But don't worry - the Sun has come to the rescue with a host of gags on Page 29." They weren't very good gags, but the idea was right.