Sub-prime chaos cost global markets $7.7trn - Bank of America

Joseph Quinlan, the Bank of America’s chief market strategist, describes the mortgage-led meltdown as “one of the most vicious in financial history”. The report follows a similarly gloomy announcement from Standard & Poors last week, which showed global stock markets were hit with a $5.2trn collective loss in January alone. Quinlan says the sub-prime losses are greater than those experienced after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and Wall Street’s ‘Black Monday’ of 1987. “While sub-prime loans were once thought to be relatively small in scale and con...