Investors have fled stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic in the worst stock-market selloff since the depths of the recession in early 2009 in what has turned into a full-fledged correction.

The Dow Jones and the S&P fell more than four per cent and the Nasdaq lost five per cent on Thursday on fear that the US is heading for another recession and that Europe's sovereign debt crisis is spreading to two of its largest economies.

Al Jazeera's Jonah Hull reports.