While things turned around quite a bit by the close of US equity markets both today and yesterday (a topic in its own right, but we’ll save that for another day) – turning on CNBC the past two days and seeing global markets in a large (greater than -1%) coordinated sell-off with news of gave us brief flashbacks of the old “the world is coming to an end days” of 2008 (and less so the 2010 and 2011 versions of the Euro crisis).

But it turned out (thus far) to be little more than a shadow of those former demonic moves where new lows came fast and furious across asset classes. And the fact remains it wasn’t too long ago we were talking about multi-month (year) highs in the US stock market and elsewhere in the risk on universe. This got us to thinking – just where do major risk markets stand in regards to their 2012 highs, and how far do they need to fall before these sell-offs are less of a shadow and more of the real thing?  We compared the May 8th lows to the highs and lows of the rest of 2012. As we’re fond of saying around here… read ‘em and weep: