Although I report on the economy in SL, I tend to remain on the edges of it - I have a small amount of money in Ginko, but made a decision some time ago that I don't trust the stockmarkets in SL - there are too many steps where things could go wrong:

• CEO/Company not trustworthy
• Stock Market staff not trustworthy
• SL hacks (other than untrustworthy staff misusing what's going on)
• Bad server-side security

and I'm sure there are more. It appears over the last fortnight we've seen, from various places, at least the first three of these going on, and probably the fourth too.

We are also seeing serious doubts cast on the probity of how Ginko conducts its business, which is a separate issue to the stock markets, although a number of the same doubts can be, and have been raised about Ginko, along with on-and-off again accusations that Ginko is all a ponzi-scheme. To be honest, I'm not sure I can keep up with all the twists and turns.

I will try to sum up (although it might be out of date before I do) and refer you to sources that give you a better running record of the twists as well as some very thoughtful insights from both a legal and a regular market player's point of view (continues under the fold).
WSE was stung, it now appears because LukeConnell Vandeverre, the CEO, trusted someone who he shouldn't have trusted. The new roll-out of WSE with unspecified "much tightened security" apparently left at least some people still able to 100% access their SL-code. WSE is seeing companies leaving it, and according to some reports is censoring statements by departing company chiefs which are critical of WSE.

Ginko, for reasons which are probably impossible to fully unpack (gambling ban, the fact they're the largest shareholder in WSE's parent company, other run on the system e.g. thanks to reduced land prices), suffered a staggering run. Various investigators are uncovering a variety of dubious practises in their reporting, and interviews and public statements are hardly encouraging.

Ginko was, apparently, planning to buy AVIX, but did this in a rather round-about issue. This fell through rather rapidly, and embarrassingly, after a press conference called to announce the purchase.

Despite Reuter's most recent article about it, the actual impact on the SL economy is hard to assess: For two days after the gambling ban, and with WSE closed, there was no obvious impact. Then Relay for Life gave us a huge daily transactions limit as we reached into our pockets. Then the gird has had issues, which probably started during RFL (not causally linked), but which have resulted in teleports being unreliable, search for places being turned off and an inevitable decrease in transactions because you have to be really keen to shop under these conditions. If the current downtime fixes all of these, perhaps we'll get some hard data without other obvious confounding (and unmeasurable) factors to look at.
Whilst I will continue to try and bring you summaries as this develops, but if you want your news and views up-to-the minute you could do worse than to look at:

Your2ndPlace (up to the minute investor opinion)
Virtually Blind (legal commentary)
SL Reports (Listed company CEO comments)