Many investors will remember last week’s market gyrations (and Wednesday’s in particular) as exceptional, exciting, frightening and draining. The wild movements affected both stock prices (including a 600-point swing in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in just a half-hour) as well as U.S. Treasury bonds, which are traditionally more stable and reassuring.

Yet the relevance and consequences of the week's extreme market fluctuations extend far beyond investors and traders to include the prospects for economies as a whole. The interrelated lessons also suggest that, looking forward, these market gyrations may not prove that unique.

Here are four noteworthy lessons to be drawn from last week:

1. It doesn’t take much to severely dislocate markets, both down and up.

It is hard to point to a single cause of Wednesday’s harrowing fall in equities and the eye-popping rise in government bond prices. Instead, a set of rather small things led to a tipping point, catching many in the marketplace (and outside) by complete surprise. While the markets’ impressive countermoves on Friday were widely attributed to a single factor -- reassuring words from Federal Reserve officials that they would maintain a highly accommodating monetary policy -- this seems rather narrow in the bigger context of what’s going on in the global economy.

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