Today's Financial Times features the rather alarming announcement from John Authers that "The bottom may soon be here". Fortunately he's talking about stock markets, noting that research from Lombard Street shows there have only been 26 months in the last 140 years that the S&P 500 has been further below trend growth than it is now, and all but six of those were caused by world wars. Authers concedes that stocks could fall still further, but argues that "it is almost impossible to say that stocks are expensive".

Nils Pratley, in the Guardian, is less sanguine. "Yikes" is his reaction to the fact that the FTSE100 has fallen 1000 points this year and 300 points in the first two days of this week. Pratley also detects in this sell-off "a nasty new ingredient: the fear that companies will cut their dividends on a scale not seen since the 1930s". He notes the ironic fact that it was HSBC analysis which yesterday published a list of large UK non-financials whose dividend yields are over 6% but where the payment is covered by less than twice earnings – including BP and Shell, who between them account for almost a fifth of dividends paid by UK companies. "At the moment", he warns, "pension funds and institutional investors look at UK plc and see a horrible cash mismatch. Companies are not only cutting dividends but are also asking for fresh funds via rights issues. How does a pension fund find the readies? It sells shares, reinforcing the bear market."

The Independent's Jeremy Warner also notes the role in crashing markets of the dividend outlook. Whilst companies have a tendency to over-exaggerate their losses in a downturn, he argues, we are nonetheless "left with a truly appalling outlook for corporate earnings. Unfortunately for equity holders, they have last call on anything that survives the cull. Bondholders, bankers, the Revenue, employees, creditors and pensioners all come first. Whatever your view of the length and depths of the recession, it is plainly going to be an awfully long time before corporate earnings recover to anything like normalised levels."