Things can only get worse

With 158 year old Lehman Brothers, one of the world's biggest investment banks, filing for bankruptcy, Bank of America buying Merrill Lynch, another giant of investment banking and American International Group (AIG), the world's largest insurance company, panting to be shored up, a student of commerce will now hesitate to knock at the door of a finance house for a job.

These three events centering on Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG are, without exaggeration, the biggest Wall Street headlines in a decade.Bank of America, the second-largest US bank, with Merrill in its possession will now turn out to be the top US bank and will likely put 24,000 of Merrill's 60,000 non-broker employees worldwide out of work. That, combined with Lehman's approximately 26,000 workers out of jobs, will send major shockwaves through the job markets. Just the other day Hurricane Ike pounded Texas, leaving behind floods, power outage and large-scale damage to lives, homes and properties. The hurricane, according to some soothsayers, seems to portend that things are not going to be well in America and the rest of the world. An air of gloom and despondency seems to be haunting the whole financial world.Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy is one of the worst banking collapses in history. Lehman is the latest financial butterfly to flap its wings, and its sudden fall will have ripple effects throughout the entire world of finance. Lehman's bankruptcy is the latest symptom of how sick the financial institutions in America are and illustrates just how intertwined the global economy actually is.Financial commentators are blaming Lehman Brothers CEO with a big dose of bad luck, for the institution's fall from grace. Until June, it had never even reported a quarterly loss as a public company.

The world is face to face with a great turning point in the next few days, as three major brokers of the world have now disappeared from the scene. There will be winners and losers, and only those who are fittest and trustworthy will ultimately survive as the US government can't and won't bail out every sick institution as it did with Bear Stearns.If Hurricane Ike's lashing of the American coast and Lehman Brothers' sad demise in the latest financial tsunami hitting the Wall Street augur that a recession is going to hit the world anytime soon, it is time for all of us to be braced for cataclysmic events like the ones that once hit the world in the 1930s.