It's every writer's fantasy: you make it up, then it comes true. This is the standard fiction that gets worked into a half a dozen movies a year. But it's happening to me, it really is.

So let me run this scenario by you. It's a longer version of what Hollywood producers might refer to as an elevator pitch.

There's unrest in the world's financial markets. Over the years, investors, regulators, central banks and politicians have been grumbling about volatility. The news media report the increasingly wild, but consistently inexplicable gyrations in shares, bonds and currencies. In the absence of a clear explanation for all this, journalists just pin the blame on hidden forces beneath the surface of the supposedly transparent market. In psychological terms, these forces are what you might as well label "other" – hedge fund managers, private equity players, the kind of people who would have been called yuppies back in the 80s.

Then something goes wrong, badly wrong. There's a glitch in the machine – a commodity price spikes up, or a bank falters, precipitating a crisis of confidence among the investment community. Suddenly, no-one wants to take a share of anyone else's position. Every investor in the market – bank, pension fund, day trader – is interested only in protecting their own positions. There's no question of laying off liability, or spreading risk. Thousands of investors find themselves with depreciating assets rotting away in their portfolios. Fear stalks the markets.

The markets seemed to have got used to volatility, but this is different. No-one has the courage to trade. Shares and bonds plummet amid the mounting panic. Commodity prices – especially oil and gold – soar as the instinct to hoard tangible goods takes hold.

Hate figures

The media compound the problem. Journalists enter a kind of ecstatic state, drunk on a heady cocktail of fear, anger and joy. Fourth-estate schadenfreude at the agony of the investment world – journalists envy the material success of City types – is tempered with rage and terror at the mayhem unleashed by the crisis. Scapegoats are sought. Hedge fund managers, who undoubtedly have made money out of volatility over the years, get blamed. Individuals get singled out for special punishment, and become hate figures in the world's press.

The ultimate fear of many news editors is losing their own houses. They react to this prospect somewhat curiously; they confront their nightmares by commissioning and publishing lurid collages of doom. The end of the financial world is at hand, they intone. There are warnings of imminent housing market collapse. Biblical atonement for the orgy of consumption is at hand. The fifth horseman of the apocalypse is called Meltdown - and he is stabling his mare right now.

Sound familiar at all? In that case, you've either read the set up for my novel, Meltdown, published this week by Macmillan, and set against a backdrop of financial catastrophe, or you've been paying attention to the way the markets have been reported in the media recently.

In the first week of this year, the FTSE 250 index lost 7% of its value. Acres of column space have been devoted to Northern Rock and its early efforts to pay back some of the billions of debt it owes a harassed Treasury. The investment bank Goldman Sachs has been vilified in some quarters for having made money in the mortgage markets. Despite this – or maybe because of it, who knows? – Goldman's chief economist Jim O'Neill has published commentary arguing that international confidence in London as a financial centre is badly dented.

Oil, in case you hadn't noticed, touched $100 per barrel on some contracts this past month. Gold – the preferred investment of the paranoid peasant and the harrowed hoarder – has just breached the $900 barrier.

And there's a credit crunch going on – and on, and on. In the first trading week of the year, UBS and Merrill Lynch offered the market the latest in a seemingly endless series of warnings that the sub-prime debt problems are more serious than originally thought. The crisis of confidence that this has precipitated shows no signs of abating.

Doom and gloom

In the UK, petrol pump prices are rocketing as the high oil price becomes even more expensive – the pound is weakening rapidly against both dollar and euro. A key reason that foreign exchange dealers are marking sterling down is because a beleaguered UK government is putting pressure on the Bank of England to lower interest rates. Easing the cost of credit might be seen as good news in happier times, but when there is fear of meltdown all news is bad news. The Bank, by the way, is still notionally independent - but actually very politically cooperative and highly likely to lower rates this year.

The media coverage of all this has arguably added fuel to the conflagration. On the one hand, it has been abject in its fear for the housing market – the only asset class that really matters to middle England - and the comfortable life of the fourth estate. Cue gloom and doom reports.

On the other hand, the coverage has been irate and bitter. The entire media world seems to have become a Daily Mail columnist - very angry, and absolutely certain it's all someone else's fault. The search is on for the individuals who've made money fiddling as financial Rome burns. George Soros once made a billion in a day speculating against sterling. The news editors are looking for a sub-prime player to pillory.

And it's this scapegoating which I find worrying. My publishers at Macmillan say they love the conspiracy theory that underpins the action of Meltdown. They laugh prettily, as editors sometimes do round authors, and suggest that maybe the best conspiracy theory revolves round me. Maybe in some obscure way, I've precipitated the financial crisis, by plotting and publishing Meltdown.

Well, no. That's clearly not the case. But the parallels between the fictional world of the novel and the nastiness in today's markets are astonishing.

I think at this point, I'd better do as my hero, Samuel Spendlove does, and make myself scarce before I become a scapegoat.

Meltdown, published by Macmillan, price £10.