The stock market’s lazy drift lower turned ugly in the final hour yesterday, demonstrating once again that the Santa factor is no match this year for investors’ unusually severe jitters. The Yuletide effect should have been working at full-strength, given that weekend shopping reports were quite upbeat. (We’re not sure whether to believe these reports ourselves, since, although the local mall looked crowded, retailers at the higher end appeared to be deserted.) Shopping estimates aside, the pundits attributed the selloff to credit market woes -- which is like attributing snow to cold weather.

The most disturbing fact concerning these “woes” is that there is no logical end to them.  Granted, things always look darkest before the dawn. But in this case, we think that the financial and economic troubles that have surfaced so far are going to look like relative rays of sunshine compared to what’s coming.  Still worse is that the problems seem to be growing deeper and more menacing each day, notwithstanding the fact that Bernanke, Paulson et al. remain officially unconcerned about whether recent credit easing will suffice to turn things around.

Ohio Lawsuit

Since you are not going to hear this from either one of those guys -- nor from CNBC, at least for a while -- let us mention the Ohio lawsuit now making its way toward the U.S. Supreme Court. It seems that Deutsche Bank tried to foreclose on 14 homes in Cleveland when the residents living in them failed to make timely mortgage payments. Unfortunately for the bank, it could not produce documents showing it had legal title to the properties. Such are the complexities nowadays of a financial system that long ago decoupled from the actual risks of lending.

We are going to be hearing quite a bit more about this story in 2008. Because it corroborates a warning that we have sounded here many times before – that securities markets for hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of financial derivatives are verging on chaos – we would urge you to familiarize yourselves with the details by clicking here for a full report at Financial Sense.