Your unsettling financial thought for the day

The publicized and photographed overnight “runs” on Countrywide and the UK’s Northern Rock in mid-August were nothing compared to what’s taking place in the shadows of the real banking system. Credit contraction, with its inevitable companion of asset destruction, is spreading with the speed of an infectious bacterial disease.

— Bill Gross, Managing Director of PIMCO. They manage $720 billion in assets, mainly bonds.