25 Signs That The Financial World Is About To Hit The Big Red Panic Button, page 1

Source

#1 According to a new study just released by Merrill Lynch, the U.S. economy has an 80% chance of going into another recession.

#2 Will Bank of America be the next Lehman Brothers? Shares of Bank of America have fallen more than 40% over the past couple of months. Even though Warren Buffet recently stepped in with 5 billion dollars, the reality is that the problems for Bank of America are far from over. In fact, one analyst is projecting that Bank of America is going to need to raise 40 or 50 billion dollars in new capital.

#3 European bank stocks have gotten absolutely hammered in recent weeks.

#4 So far, major international banks have announced layoffs of more than 60,000 workers, and more layoff announcements are expected this fall. A recent article in the New York Times detailed some of the carnage....

A new wave of layoffs is emblematic of this shift as nearly every major bank undertakes a cost-cutting initiative...

#5 Credit markets are really drying up. Do you remember what happened in 2008 when that happened? Many are now warning that we are getting very close to a repeat of that.

#6 The Conference Board has announced that the U.S. Consumer Confidence Index fell from 59.2 in July to 44.5 in August. That is the lowest reading that we have seen since the last recession ended.

#7 The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index has fallen by almost 20 points over the last three months. This index is now the lowest it has been in 30 years.

#8 The Philadelphia Fed's latest survey of regional manufacturing activity was absolutely nightmarish....

#9 According to Bloomberg, since World War II almost every time that the year over year change in real GDP has fallen below 2% the U.S. economy has fallen into a recession....

#10 Economic sentiment is falling in Europe as well. The following is from a recent Reuters article....

A monthly European Commission survey showed economic sentiment in the 17 countries using the euro, a good indication of future economic activity, fell to 98.3 in August from a revised 103 in July with optimism declining in all sectors.

#11 The yield on 2 year Greek bonds is now an astronomical 42.47%.

#12 As I wrote about recently, the European Central Bank has stepped into the marketplace and is buying up huge amounts of sovereign debt from troubled nations such as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. As a result, the ECB is also massively overleveraged at this point.

#13 Most of the major banks in Europe are also leveraged to the hilt and have tremendous exposure to European sovereign debt.

#14 Political wrangling in Europe is threatening to unravel the Greek bailout package. In a recent article, Satyajit Das described what has been going on behind the scenes in the EU....

The sticking point is a demand for collateral for the second bailout package....

#15 German Chancellor Angela Merkel is trying to hold the Greek bailout deal together, but a wave of anti-bailout "hysteria" is sweeping Germany, and now according to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard it looks like Merkel may not have enough votes to approve the latest bailout package....

German media reported that the latest tally of votes in the Bundestag shows that 23 members from Mrs Merkel's own coalition plan to vote against the package.... risking a government collapse.

#16 Polish finance minister Jacek Rostowski is warning that the status quo in Europe will lead to "collapse". According to Rostowski, if the EU does not choose the path of much deeper economic integration the eurozone simply is not going to survive much longer....

"The choice is: much deeper macroeconomic integration in the eurozone or its collapse. There is no third way."

#17 German voters are against the introduction of "Eurobonds" by about a 5 to 1 margin, so deeper economic integration in Europe does not look real promising at this point.

#18 If something goes wrong with the Greek bailout, Greece is financially doomed. Just consider the following excerpt from a recent article by Puru Saxena....

....In other words, if debt pardoning does not occur, nearly a quarter of Greece’s economic output will be gobbled up by interest repayments!

#19 The global banking system has a total of 2 trillion dollars of exposure to Greek, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian debt. Considering how much the global banking system is leveraged, this amount of exposure could end up wiping out a lot of major financial institutions.

#20 The head of the IMF, Christine Largarde, recently warned that European banks are in need of "urgent recapitalization".

#21 Once the European crisis unravels, things could move very rapidly downhill. In a recent article, John Mauldin put it this way....

It is only a matter of time until Europe has a true crisis, which will happen faster – BANG!....

#22 The U.S. housing market is still a complete and total mess.

#23 According to John Lohman, the decline in U.S. economic data over the past three months has been absolutely unprecedented.

#24 Morgan Stanley now says that the U.S. and Europe are "hovering dangerously close to a recession" and that there is a good chance we could enter one at some point in the next 6 to 12 months.

#25 Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota says that he is so alarmed about the state of the economy that he may drop his opposition to more monetary easing. Could more quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve soon be on the way?

Please see link for complete commentary and citations. Despite the source, which some may question, it is a well researched and collated article pulling together a number of indicators, opinions and observations.