As stock markets plummet around the world, experts are growing worried that Europe’s crisis could spread globally, causing grave economic damage.
“Great Depression II” may be on its way, says Andrew Roberts, head of European rate strategy at RBS, according to the Telegraph of London.
"It now has potential to speed toward its conclusion: a $1 trillion European package which does little and political panic tells you we are about to reach the end of the road. The world should be discussing deflation, not inflation."
Stocks have hit nine-month lows in Asian markets, and the Euro Stoxx 50 Index was down 1.8 percent in late trading Friday. U.S. stocks plunged more than 3 percent Thursday.
Bill Gross, who manages the world’s biggest bond fund for Pimco, is worried that fiscal tightening will go too far in Japan, the euro zone, even the United States, where states are acting to slash their spending, Reuters reports.
And while the momentum for that tightening builds, financial markets are undergoing "a mini-relapse of a flight to liquidity, as hedge funds and other leveraged positions are liquidated to preserve capital," he said.
The calm that had governed financial markets since U.S. stocks bottomed in March 2009 has now disappeared.
“The issue that people are really wresting with is now we don’t know where things are going,” Scott MacDonald, head of research for Aladdin Capital told The Wall Street Journal.
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