Here Comes A Whale

"Until last week, almost nobody in the markets had heard of Northern Rock PLC. And even on Friday - when Britain's fifth-biggest mortgage lender was officially "rescued" by the Bank of England in its first lender-of-last-resort operation for 34 years - most people in the markets saw this event as "a little local difficulty" compared with the mess in the US sub-prime market or German state banks. Yet over the weekend, it gradually dawned on us that the Northern Rock crisis could be the climactic event of the present liquidity contraction and could even turn into one of the biggest financial events in a generation,.."