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“IMF Advisor: Could See Eurozone 'Meltdown' in 2 or 3 Weeks”
by Business Insider - Simone Foxman   
October 7th, 2011

In an interview on the BBC (via ZeroHedge), IMF advisor Robert Shapiro said some incredibly alarmist things.

He tells broadcasters that if eurozone leaders don't address the crisis properly we will see a meltdown as soon as later this month.

In his words:

"If they can not address [the financial crisis] in a credible way I believe within perhaps 2 to 3 weeks we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system.

We are not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we are talking about the largest banks in the world, the largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France, that will spread to the United Kingdom, it will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected. All those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the United States, and in Britain, and in Japan, and around the world.

This would be a crisis that would be in my view more serious than the crisis in 2008.... What we don't know the state of credit default swaps held by banks against sovereign debt and against European banks, nor do we know the state of CDS held by British banks, nor are we certain of how certain the exposure of British banks is to the Ireland sovereign debt problems."

And Shapiro is not just some random guy.

Aside from being an advisor to the IMF, Shapiro is the co-founder and chairman of Sonecon, LLC, and was formerly the U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard, among other degrees, oversaw the Census Bureau, and has been a Fellow at Harvard, Brookings, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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