CONFIDENCE is a curious commodity. It is true that a football team plays better if its various members are confident.

It is true that a cricketer under a steepling catch would be more likely to cling onto it if he was positive about his chances than if he stood beneath it like a timorous wee beastie.

It is true that any one of us will do a job better if we approach it in a confident frame of mind than if we start it expecting to fail.

But what a way to run a world economy - not on hard-nosed statistics but on the whims and feelings of city traders.

The FTSE index measures how confident those traders feel in the future. On Monday, they panicked. Rather than stay composed beneath the steepling catch, they flunked it and ran the other way.

Yesterday, the American central bank, the Federal Reserve, surprised everyone by cutting its interest rates by a large amount. This reassured the city traders, and yesterday the British stock market closed slightly up on the day.

But, having slept on it, the world's traders will have to judge the Fed's move today. Will they see it as a swift and decisive intervention that will stave off global recession, or will they see it as an act of desperation that only shows how dire a predicament the world economy is in?

We have to hope the former. Never before have we all been so dependent on the world economy - our own jobs, pensions, mortgages, savings and futures are at risk here - and never before has the global economy been so interlinked.

America caught a cold and it has spread like the plague throughout the western world. We have to hope that it is contained here. We must hope that it doesn't spread to the east, to China and India. More than ever before, we need these emergent economies to remain bullish, to continue spending and investing so that their confidence pulls us out of the slough of despond.