Business and Finance

Investor confidence fell to its lowest level on record in October in a massive flight from risky assets, State Street said on Tuesday.

The U.S. financial services firm said its global State Street Investor Confidence Index fell to 58.2 in the month from an upwardly revised 75.7 in September, previously reported as 70.7.

It was the lowest level recorded in the more than 10 years for which State Street has compiled the index, falling below the previous trough of 65.9 set in December 2007.

The index is extrapolated from movements in more than $15 trillion of assets State Street holds as custodian for institutional investors.

“The combination of financial crisis along with truly global macroeconomic risk of deep recession has been causing a complete re-evaluation of risk across a wide investment community centered on U payday loan cash advance loan.S. institutional investors,” said Harvard University Professor Ken Froot, a co-developer of the index.

Froot noted that even the strongest, broad-based selling of risk seen in State Street data during the 1996 Asian crisis and the Russian crisis of 1998 “appears small compared with the current outflows.”

The latest reading was measured using data from September 17 to October 15, a period in which the MSCI all-country world stock index .MIWD00000PUS fell more than 22 percent. It has since recovered slightly.

It was also a period in which governments and central banks were forced to take extraordinary measures to inject liquidity into the battered world financial system. 

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