Ricardo's Business: Westpac on market meltdown

The Australian sharemarket took a battering as fear of asecond global financial crisis took hold.

Since the April peak, the All Ordinaries Index is down around 15 per cent.

Also down is the Australian dollar, loosing US6 cents in just one week.

So should investors have serious cause for concern, where to now, and what does it mean for interest rates?

Bill Evans from Westpac was the first to call a December interest rate cut, and now other economists are jumping on that bandwagon.