After an initial lull, financial markets reacted with a vengeance to the COVID-19 pandemic, touching all asset categories—stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. Comparisons with 2008 are inevitable, but the ultimate impact on markets is still unclear. In this chapter, we suggest that the spread of the pandemic has limited explanatory power over financial stress. Initially, as the pandemic only affected advanced countries, markets penalized more emerging economies. Subsequently, emerging nations benefited from the global rebound of the markets, even though death rates are now expanding in the emerging world. Despite initial concern, emerging economies have been less penalised than in 2008. Once more, this has exposed the vulnerabilities of emerging markets to global shocks but also the importance of the coordinated actions by core central banks to supply liquidity to the markets.