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Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, has begun falling once again after a brief rally earlier in the year. It is now hovering above multi-year lows at about US$50 per barrel.

Iron ore is an essential raw material needed to feed China’s steel mills, and as such is a good gauge of the construction boom.

The benchmark iron ore price has fallen to US$56 per tonne, less than half its US$140 per tonne level in January 2014.

3. Resource price crisis

Billions of dollars in loans were raised on global capital markets to fund new mines and oil exploration that was only ever profitable at previous elevated prices.

With oil and metals prices having collapsed, many of these projects are now loss-making. The loans raised to back the projects are now under water and investors may never see any returns.

Nowhere has this been felt more acutely than shale oil and gas drilling in the U.S. Tumbling oil prices have squeezed the finances of U.S. drillers. Two of the biggest issuers of junk bonds in the past five years, Chesapeake and California Resources, have seen the value of their bonds tumble as panic grips capital markets.

As more debt needs refinancing in future years, there is a risk the contagion will spread rapidly.

4. Dominoes falling

The great props to the world economy are now beginning to fall. China is going into reverse. And the emerging markets that consumed so many of our products are crippled by currency devaluation. The famed Brics of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, to whom the West was supposed to pass on the torch of economic growth, are in varying states of disarray.