I enjoy reading information from John Mauldin and his outside the box newsletter. The other day he forwarded a piece by Bennet Sedacca entitled “Dead Men Walking.” This started to spell out not only who they expect to see fall in the near future, but how and why the dominoes that fall actually do so. Forget the fact that they expect the following companies/banks/financial institutions to go away (see list below) but more importantly take a look at this article (Google him/the article I don’t even want to know how to do that whole link thing!)
Some of the dominoes to fall:
Bear Stearns fallen and can’t get up
Fannie/Freddie fallen, not ready to share the ugly truth yet
Lehman Brothers
National City
Washington Mutual
Zions Bancorp
KeyCorp
Fifth Third Bank
Regions Financial
GM/GMAC
Ford/Ford Motor Credit
CitiGroup
There will undoubtedly be more, I personally have shared with clients that I expect no fewer than 200 institutions to fail, fold, collapse whatever term you want to use over the next 12-18 months. These imminent failures will certainly require our national government (you remember the people who are already so ridiculously overspending that we are only years away from not even being able to make our interest payments on our foreign debt) to step in to the tune of, my best guess, over $1trillion just on the FDIC side. Disgusting, truly, pathetic and disgusting. Yet how many Americans today are doing the same exact thing? Are you spending more than you are earning? Are your savings growing each month? Are you paying down your debts? Are you a fiscally responsible American or do you just play one in front of an audience to look good whenever you can?
