Concerns about the strength of the global recovery are now playing a far bigger role than fundamentals in investor thinking, a state of affairs that has led to a high, often inexplicable, correlation between assets.

As UBS macro analyst Ramin Nakisa points out, there really is no logic to Japanese real estate, for instance, being correlated with the price of wheat. For Nakisa, markets "are being driven by a single, global cyclical risk premium, which in turn has been driven by headlines out of Europe".