WSJ's MarketBeat Blog on Financial Armageddon

The Wall Street Journal's MarketBeat blog has a few things to say about Financial Armageddon in "A Bookish Bear."

Scott Patterson has this report on one author (quoted several times in this column) with a good sense of timing.

Talk about timing. On March 1, two days after stocks tumbled a week ago, “Financial Armageddon,” a new book by Wall Street veteran Michael Panzner, was published. Not that Mr. Panzner foresaw the meltdown that sliced more than 400 points from the Dow Jones Industrial Average last Tuesday. He has been bearish for some time and simply hit a bulls-eye with the publication of his book.

“In terms of the market having a bell-ringing moment, it was just blind luck,” he said. Still, he thinks the decline will turn out to be a key moment for financial markets. “These people who say that nothing has changed and it’s a buying opportunity aren’t looking at this from the proper perspective.”

Runaway debt is at the core of Mr. Panzner’s bearish tome, both that accumulated by the government, as well as financial institutions, which he sees as overleveraged. He expresses concern over the eye-popping growth of the credit-default swap market. Outstanding CDSs have surged to $26 trillion by the second quarter of 2006, up from $1 trillion in 2001, he writes. CDSs linked to subprime mortgages have plummeted recently, raising concerns about further trouble in the mortgage market and the stability of the broader real-estate market.