Maybe I haven't been reading Roubini long enough or carefully enough, but today his post seems every bit a total and complete freak out.
His past posts were mostly filled with stern and sobering warnings, heavy with very dense facts and jargon I mostly don't understand and have to google.
Yes there was a bit of doom and gloom but he seemed to have confidence the worst was not going to happen given some sensible intervention.
It seems worth placing this link here: Asian Markets in near free fall.
(thanks to geodemographics)
Read this:
The US and advanced economies’ financial system is now headed towards a near-term systemic financial meltdown as day after day stock markets are in free fall, money markets have shut down while their spreads are skyrocketing, and credit spreads are surging through the roof. There is now the beginning of a generalized run on the banking system of these economies; a collapse of the shadow banking system...
The crisis was caused by the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in the history of humanity... a housing bubble, a mortgage bubble, an equity bubble, a bond bubble, a credit bubble, a commodity bubble, a private equity bubble, a hedge funds bubble are all now bursting at once in the biggest real sector and financial sector deleveraging since the Great Depression.
When in markets that are clearly way oversold even the most radical policy actions don’t provide rallies or relief to market participants you know that you are one step away from a market crack and a systemic financial sector and corporate sector collapse. A vicious circle of deleveraging, asset collapses, margin calls, cascading falls in asset prices well below falling fundamentals and panic is now underway.
At this point severe damage is done and one cannot rule out a systemic collapse and a global depression. It will take a significant change in leadership of economic policy and very radical, coordinated policy actions among all advanced and emerging market economies to avoid this economic and financial disaster. Urgent and immediate necessary actions that need to be done globally (with some variants across countries depending on the severity of the problem and the overall resources available to the sovereigns) include:
He goes on to describe point by point some even more radical actions governments will have to take on a coordinated global level. These are actions that seem to amount to the end of any 'private' sector financial institution.
And, he concludes:
At this point anything short of these radical and coordinated actions may lead to a market crash, a global systemic financial meltdown and to a global depression.