[user104658]

Everything has been dropping in the West for a while; Asian markets then tend to follow as they have such huge manufacturing economies... but their market is West. So basically West tumbles, buying power reduces, East follows.

Oil and Gas are (more or less) the driving forces in all of this currently. You could loosely say the war in Ukraine but that's just the issue of the moment - the larger elephant in the room is that as fossil fuels become more scarce (and eventually run out) there are going to be major global disruptions until a stable alternative is found (as yet, there isn't one, due to the vast resources needed to convert everything to electric, and the fact that everyone **** their pants over nuclear energy so we don't have the grid capacity for going full-electric or even close).