As a whole, investors should welcome attempts to safeguard the integrity of markets. You need very clear rules applied to markets.

Once you start moving [market] lower, then you trigger of all sorts of things. You trigger people who have to sell because they're over-levered. So they sell their winners and their losers. They're just trying to raise cash. So, what you then get is spreading malaise throughout the global markets.

[When] the market is trying to get to terms with, first, lower global growth, particularly out of emerging markets and China. And, second, the market is worried the central banks have run out of ammunition. So put these two things together, and then investors are repricing the market lower.

Most people are under exposed to global assets, including foreign stocks, bonds and currencies.

The world is on a bumpy journey to a new destination and the New Normal.

It is hard to imagine that, having downgraded the US, S & P will not follow suit on at least one of the other members of the dwindling club of sovereign AAAs. If this were to materialise and involve a country like France, for example, it could complicate the already fragile efforts by Europe to rescue countries in its periphery.

Investors should be cautiously positioned as the global economy and markets face major uncertainties. The downgrade will be a further headwind to growth and job creation in the U.S.