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Stock exchange - Source: Reuters
As the old saying goes, markets are ruled in turns by fear and greed. This week, it went beyond fear to sheer panic as the natural disaster in Japan threatened to turn into a nuclear disaster.
Obviously the most important, the most heartwrenching number to come out of Japan this week has been the numbers missing and feared dead.
But the clinical, calculated world of the markets has been dealing with some staggering numbers of its own.
The Bank of Japan has now pumped 34 trillion yen into the money markets, or 600 billion New Zealand dollars.
Monday saw the Nikkei fall 6.5% and almost 24 trillion yen, or around $423 billion, was wiped off the value of the stock market.
Monday started to look like a positively measured response once Tuesday brought with it a 10.5% stock market fall and yet more trillions of yen evaporated.
And the panic was catching, markets right around the world plunged in tandem with the Nikkei.
Globally, markets lost about a trillion US dollars in value this week as sheer panic took hold.
Then, as counterintuitive as it may seem, investors started to see bargains among beaten-down stocks.
Today on European markets some even saw value in the same insurers that have been sold off with such gusto over the past few days.
Historical comparisons abound as investors and analysts alike grapple to put the scale of this event in context.
The two-day fall on the Nikkei was the biggest since the 1987 stock market crash. Some likened trading conditions to those at the height of the financial crisis.
"It was very reminiscent of October 2008 post the Lehman crash and almost, almost but not quite, as bad as trading post 9/11," Kevin Morgan from OM Financial told me on AMP Business this morining.
He's referring specifically to the hour between 10 and 11 yesterday morning, when the Yen, which has been rallying all week, suddenly skyrocketed.
Within ten minutes it was up 5% on the kiwi.
It surged to post-war highs against the US dollar, sparked by comments from European Union officials that the problems with nuclear reactors in Japan were out of control.
Today, the finance ministers and central bankers of the G7 - the world's major industrialised nations - are due to hold a conference call to discuss global volatility and market liquidity.
Speculation is rife that this meeting is a precursor to the Bank of Japan intervening in the currency markets to bring down the Yen.
The rapid appreciation of the currency is a concern because the last thing an economy like Japan needs is for its exporters' returns to be hit just as they are trying to recover from a disaster of such massive proportions.
But recover they will and fairly quickly if international economist Andrew Hunt, who we had on the programme this week, is to be believed.
"If you look at a long term chart of Japanese production it really does bounce back very quickly. In fact you can barely see what happened in 1995 (the Kobe earthquake) in the data".
However quickly that happens, Japan's economy faces some major issues and those issues are unlikely to remain solely domestic.
Government debt in Japan is double its gross domestic product - far higher than that of debt-troubled eurozone countries like Greece and Portugal.
The difference is, Japan funds much of its deficit the same way it will presumably attempt to pay for the crisis - by issuing government bonds.
The primary market for those bonds in the past has been those notoriously saavy savers - the Japanese themselves.
Those same savers also make Japan a big lender to countries who borrow on international credit markets, like Australia, Brazil, the United States and, to a lesser extent now, New Zealand.
If more of Japan's savings are directed towards funding its own recovery, it will have implications for the countries because they may have to pay more for money they borrow.
Japan's monetary policy is also ultra-loose and the Bank of Japan is adding liquidity to help support the money markets, economist Andrew Hunt says with a massive rebuild now required, it won't be able to stay that way for long.
"They won't want to repeat the mistakes of the Federal Reserve after 9/11, leaving liquidity in and giving us the financial boom, bubble and the inflation that followed there," Hunt said.
"So I think the bank of Japan will probably revert to a relatively tight stance 3 to 6 months and leave the economy as stable a monetary position as possible, trying to avoid an outbreak of inflation that could confuse matters, it doesn't help".
And with a natural disaster that could still escalate to full-blown nuclear disaster, Japan needs all the help it can get.
