So, where do you put your money now?

With the United States now stumbling into recession, and the world's stock markets belatedly recognising the fact, the rush to safety is on. And for those with stronger stomachs, and plenty of cash, rare buying opportunities are starting to emerge.

For the past year, the biggest profits have been made in betting against bloated markets. John Paulson, a New York hedge fund manager, has already entered the investors' pantheon for his bet that the US mortgage business would fall to pieces.

He earned more than $2bn in 2007 just for himself, and a lunch invitation from George Soros who wanted to know how he did it. Soros doubtless benefited his own short positions on Monday by saying the world was entering its worst financial crisis since the Second World War.

While stock markets plunged this week, certain classes of 'safe haven' investment continued to soar. Gold is now trading at a record price of more than $900 per ounce and new means of trading the metal are being introduced on markets throughout the world.

On January 9, China introduced its first gold futures contract, while in India, Hong Kong and throughout the Middle East, investors are drooling over new tradable gold funds. Die-hard gold investors believe the price could top $1,600 per ounce as uncertainty grows about the global economy and security. Demand for inflation-protected US government bonds, or TIPS, has also sky-rocketed as fears of inflation grow.

Oil too continues to trade near the $100-a barrel-mark, with little sign of retreat despite recently dropping back under $90/barrel. As well as driving up the market valuations of oil companies, this has also spurred demand for companies in newly oil-rich countries - Russian and Venezuelan mobile phone companies, for example, or any company set to profit from a new consumer class.

Until Monday, at least, investors were also diverting money away from European and American stocks into emerging market funds as a means of avoiding the impending crash. T Rowe Price, one of the stodgiest American fund managers, launched a Middle East and North African fund late last year and has already taken in $400m from its Main Street customers.

In the US, those with cash are already surveying the wreckage for good companies bloodied by irrational fear, the 'fallen angel' stocks. Warren Buffett is suddenly everywhere, boosting his holdings in railroad companies, which he believes are still cheap and have a chance to do very well in the years to come, and ugly but profitable manufacturing businesses unfairly dragged down in the sub-prime debacle.

Buffett has been patient since the last stock bust in 2001, waiting for the right moment to spend the $45bn in cash he has accumulated at Berkshire Hathaway. Now, the time has come. Companies with even the slightest link to housing, whether well or poorly run, have all been beaten down in the past few months and are now being snapped up.

Agricultural commodities are another hot area. Wheat, corn, soybeans and rice are near or at record prices. The US Government-subsidised expansions of corn-based ethanol production has shrunk the amount of land devoted to corn for eating. Meanwhile, global stockpiles of crucial foodstuffs are low, threatening a dramatic spike in the price of a trip to the supermarket. Companies which either grow food or help it grow more efficiently with fertiliser or genetically modified seed are already in demand.

Until this week, investors liked to speak of a 'decoupling' of the American economy from the rest of the world. If America sneezed in 2008, the rest of the world ought not to catch a cold. There were supposed to be enough consumers in multiple markets now to make up for the credit-crunched American shopper, punished at the pump and threatened with default on his over-priced home.

This week's share-price tumble may show that there has been no such ‘decoupling’; that the world's investors cannot imagine an economic world without a shopaholic America. ·