In its own small way, the latest quarterly survey from Scottish Chambers of Commerce captures, to perfection, the prevailing psychology of today's markets.

All round the world the dominant mood is increasingly gloomy. Talk of outright recession is strongest in the United States where, according to The Economist, its own informal R-word index is now flashing clear warning signals. That index measures how many times, each quarter, the Washington Post and the New York Times use the word "recession".

The count is rising sharply. And with a housing crisis, plummeting consumer demand and sharp rises in unemployment counts, it's not hard to see why.

Throw in the spectacle of such Wall Street banking stalwarts as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch engaged in an unseemly scramble to attract fresh capital - much of it from Middle and Far Eastern sovereign wealth funds - to shore up battered balance sheets and the sense of panic reaches the gates of the citadel itself.

The unravelling of the sub-prime and credit crises has produced losses and writedowns totalling more than $80bn (£40.7bn) so far.

No-one really knows how much more financial blood has yet to be spilt. But the prog- nosis, at the start of a US presidential election year, is looking increasingly grim.

Elsewhere, the outlook is less doom-laden. Energy producers, from Russia to the Gulf, are running up such surpluses they don't quite know what to do with it all. Much of Asia, especially China and India, continues to deliver strong growth. Europe is being held up by the American economist and commentator Paul Krugman as the "comeback continent".

The UK has its problems, notably how to resolve the Northern Rock fiasco. But despite a mixed festive trading season and a fast-cooling housing market, employment is still hitting record highs and inflation remains close to the Bank of England target of 2%.

At the macro level, the price of oil, having breached the symbolic $100 a barrel ceiling before Christmas, is now trading below $90 on fears that gas-guzzling America may already be in recession.

And the global liquidity crisis, which sent interbank lending rates soaring, has eased as rates have returned closer to previous norms.

Yet from Hong Kong to London investors have taken flight. Equity markets appear to have finally caught up with an accelerating bear rush elsewhere.

Having sought comfort in the knowledge that, historically, corporate earnings in 2007 were extremely buoyant, there's a rush to the exits.

The FTSE-100 index crashed through its 6000 floor yesterday for the first time since August, in what is, apparently, the worst start to a new year since records began in 1935. The FTSE All-Share has plunged 7.1% in a couple of weeks.

Little wonder, then, with all this talk of financial meltdown and looming recession, that the just under 300 Scottish firms which responded to the latest Chambers survey are reporting similar misgivings about what lies ahead for them.

In the final three months of 2007 a positive balance of the survey's sample of manufacturers, large retailers and tourism businesses were still reporting increased sales and orders. Many are still investing, recruiting more staff and, in the case of Scottish manufacturing, paying more to get the right people.

But according to this snap- shot, confidence is falling across all sectors of the Scottish economy. It's a stark reminder that, at turning points in any economy, psychology plays as big a part, if not a bigger, than day- to-day commercial realities in determining what happens next.

Whatever the evidence about such tangibles as demand and margins, the prevailing market mindset is shaped just as much by intangibles, which we parcel up into a word like "confidence" or "sentiment". We can, and sometimes do, talk ourselves into bigger problems than the fundamentals first portend.

Is that what's under way now? I wouldn't want to understate the problems in sectors like finance. And, in any case, banks have an uncanny knack of being near the scene of the crime whenever recession is suspected. Then there's a powerful new narrative emerging from an increasingly assertive green lobby which argues that growth is a false political god, recession is the normal condition of the poor and dispossessed, and only a universal slump will bring us to our senses.

In a piece called "Bring on the Recession", posted on his personal blog last October, the commentator George Monbiot wrote: "Growth is a political sedative, snuffing out protest, permitting governments to avoid confrontation with the rich, preventing the construction of a just and sustainable economy. Growth has permitted the social stratification which even the Daily Mail now laments."

Perhaps, for multifarious and conflicting reasons, we are talking ourselves into a serious economic slowdown, perhaps even recession. We have yet to see what governments and their agents, notably central bankers, try to do about it. What to do about America's troubled economy is bound to loom larger as the presidential race moves towards its climax.

Will the Fed embark on another aggressive round of rate cutting, as it seems to be hinting? Will the Bank of England and others follow suit? And if they do, will such monetary easing cut through the prevailing downbeat mood? We are about to find out.