(CN) - Global stock markets lost more than $2 trillion in value on Friday after Briton's voted to leave the European Union, setting the stage for an uncertain and volatile week ahead in politics and finance.
U.S. stocks alone lost $830 billion in valuation, with $657 billion in value evaporating in a matter of hours from the S&P 500, a stock market index based on 500 large companies with common stock listed on either the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ.
The skid continued on Sunday in the Middle East, where financial markets opened for the first time since the outcome of the British vote was announced. Like their counterparts in the rest of the world, investors in the Middle East expected the UK to remain in the US.
When voters decided differently, a wave of uncertainty swept the financial sector.
The Saudi Tadawul stock exchange, the region's largest, closed down 1.1 percent. Meanwhile Egypt's EGX 30 stock market index tumbled a full 5.54 percent.
Other Mideast markets, such as those in Abu Dhabi and Dubai fell somewhere in between in their respective loses.
While all was going on, oil prices also sank, with the benchmark U.S. crude dropping 4.9 percent to close at $47.64 a barrel. The price of Brent crude also fell by 4.9 percent, with the price bottoming out at $48.41 in London before markets closed on Friday.
Britons voted 52 to 48 percent Thursday in favor of ending their country's 43-year membership in the 28-nation European Union. No country has ever left the EU before, and economists blamed most of Friday and the weekend's financial gyrations on knee-jerk reactions to a wholly unexpected outcome.
However, the fact remains that no one knows exactly how the uncoupling of Great Britain and the EU will play out, and that uncertainty is stoking fears of a significant slowdown in economic activity in Europe, with the ripples being felt around the world.
Britain has yet to formally notify the EU of how it hopes to proceed, but early indications are that it envisions an orderly exit to be culminated by 2019 or thereabouts. However, senior EU politicians demanded Saturday that the Britain get on with it and quickly cut its ties with the 28-nation bloc.
"There is a certain urgency ... so that we don't have a period of uncertainty, with financial consequences, political consequences," French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said at a meeting in Berlin of the EU's six founding nations Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker warned that the split was "not an amicable divorce" but noted it was never "a tight love affair anyway."
"I don't think the news came out with enough lead time to have institutional investment committees sit down and decide what to do," said Thierry Albert Wizman, a strategist with Macquarie. "This is an automated response to what has happened. Human decision making will intervene."
In the meantime, European central bankers met over the weekend in Basel, Switzerland for a pre-scheduled meeting, but the potential fallout from the UK referendum was reportedly the sole focus of their discussions.