Major Meltdown Imminent!

The nation’s largest banks are so close to collapse and the world economy is coming unglued so rapidly, a major Wall Street meltdown is now imminent. Specifically, it’s now increasingly likely that virtually all of our forecasts of recent months could come to pass in a very short period of time, including …

* Stock market crash: A swift plunge in stocks to about 5000 on the Dow, 500 on the S&P 500 and 900 on the Nasdaq … or lower.
* Corporate bankruptcies: A chain reaction of Chapter 11 filings or federal takeovers, including not only General Motors and Chrysler, but also Ann Taylor, Best Buy, Jet Blue, Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sears, Toys “R” Us, U.S. Airways and even giants like Ford or General Electric.
* Megabank failures: Bankruptcies or nationalization not only of Citigroup and Bank of America, but also JPMorgan Chase and HSBC.
* Nationwide epidemic of small and medium-sized bank failures: Outright FDIC takeovers, with little prospect of nationalization.
* Insurance failures: State takeovers of companies like Ambac Assurance, Bankers Life and Casualty, Conseco, FGIC, Medical Liability Mutual, Mortgage Guaranty Insurance, Nuclear Electric Insurance, PMI Mortgage, Standard Life of Indiana and many others.
* Cities and states: An epidemic of defaults by thousands of cities, states and other issuers of tax-exempt municipal bonds.
* Stock market shutdowns: Trading halts on major, big-cap stocks … plus on-again, off-again exchange shutdowns, making it increasingly difficult for investors to liquidate their holdings at any price.
* Credit market deep freeze: A virtual shutdown in all debt markets except U.S. Treasuries. An avalanche of selling — and virtually no buyers — for corporate bonds, commercial paper, asset-backed securities, municipal bonds and all forms of bank loans.
* Government bond collapse: A steep decline in the price of medium-and long-term government securities, as the U.S. Treasury bids aggressively for scarce funds to finance a ballooning budget deficit.



Shocking? Perhaps. Avoidable? No. Nor am I alone in anticipating this rapid unraveling of the economy and financial markets. This past Friday, at a Columbia University dinner, George Soros said the financial system has effectively disintegrated, with the turbulence more severe than during the Great Depression and with the decline comparable to the fall of the Soviet Union, while Paul Volcker said he could not remember any time, even in the Great Depression, when things went down so fast and quite so uniformly around the world. Both recognize that we’re in a new era of chaos.

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