Last week, many of the brokers and fund managers I spoke to sounded rather more nervous than usual and an investment round-table I hosted on Tuesday was relentlessly pessimistic. According to delegates (a mix of hedge-fund managers and market commentators) the western world is not far off some kind of financial Armageddon.
Property markets in America and Britain are teetering on the edge of collapse, they said. Household debt is totally out of control, making consumers and any companies that rely on them vulnerable. Public debt is also rising at an alarming - and unsustainable - rate.
At the same time, China and India are taking over as the world's manufacturers of just about everything, siphoning off employment and hence income from the West. This fragile state of affairs can't last: at some point the endgame will arrive, our economic balance will collapse and the world's financial assets will tumble.
This is a view with which I have a great deal of sympathy. Much of it is made up of long-term worries that will take time to work themselves out, but one thing that must surely be a short-term concern is the level of private debt. Household debt is now hovering at around 2.5 times average net income and debt-service costs are running at 10%-11% of income. This is widely considered to be just about reasonable. But is it? Debt is rising much faster than income - to the extent that Andrew Large, deputy governor of the Bank of England, has pointed out that at this rate it won't be long before debt servicing costs approach the crippling levels they hit in 1990 (15.5%, a peak that soon triggered a five-year slump). Indeed, even if debt levels were to stop rising now, it would take only a few small rate hikes to take us back to that level.
None of this misery makes it easy for the investor - particularly as the markets refuse to recognise the danger. The recent rally may be looking tired but US stocks are still expensive. They are trading at 23 times their earnings (with the Nasdaq on 80 times) and yield a pathetic 1.6%. The British market is on 17.4 times earnings with a 3.1% yield. That's not cheap.
So when it came to the bit of the round table where I asked everyone for top tips for a last-minute Isa, there was something of a silence before a consensus emerged that there's nothing wrong with keeping a lot of your money in cash. You can get a good, risk-free 4% on it - if it's good enough for Warren Buffett (who is holding 40% of his shareholders' funds in cash) it's probably good enough for the rest of us. Otherwise there was a general feeling that the oil price is not coming down any time soon and precious metals are still a good place to be.
I'd agree on both counts. In the short term the Arab countries have no intention of letting the price fall much - they have their own spending programmes to pay for. That makes BP and perhaps even out-of-favour Shell worth considering.
And among the precious metals, gold and silver are still long-term buys. They provide a nice hedge against all the horrors predicted above. The Merrill Lynch Gold and General fund is a good way to get exposure.
Merryn Somerset Webb is a former stockbroker and now editor of Money Week. Her views are personal and investors should always seek professional advice