Gee, what a shock. Bank shares getting ravaged as traders fear there's still billions more in write-downs to come. Ya don't say?

Hint to traders and MSM: The writedowns are just getting started. When the smoke clears, they'll be in the hundreds of billions, more likely trillions. Banks will fail. Taxpayers and shareholders will get burned. And it was all so obvious (to some).

It's called a Ponzi Scheme. It's called The Greatest Crash in Recorded Human History. And someone had to be left holding the bag.

Gonna be fun to see some of the former leaders of Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Countrywide, WaMu and more frog-marched one day. It's called Sarbanes-Oxley, and damn, it's sure not a good idea to sign inflated or falsified financial statements anymore. I guess they didn't get the memo. Had to keep the shell game going to cash in those hundreds of millions of dollars I understand, but still...

Meanwhile, know your FDIC limits HP'ers. More bank failures are on the way...

Banks hit again as credit fears spread

Fears of a fresh wave of losses arising from the credit squeeze spread around the globe on Friday, depressing stock markets in Europe and Asia and savaging bank shares for the second day in a row.

Despite a surge in US employment growth last month, investors remained worried that banks and other financial institutions still faced heavy losses arising from the troubled US mortgage market and related securities.

Andrew Wilkinson, analyst at Interactive Brokers, said: “A daisy chain of market reports predicting continued writedowns and runaway credit losses” at the biggest banks and brokerage firms hit investor sentiment.