Even before the ironclad principle of “bank bail-ins” is imposed across Europe on Jan. 1, ominous events around its dying “zombie banks” are signalling that the entire trans-Atlantic world is heading into one huge and chaotic financial explosion.

“Europe’s Zombie Banks,” headlined the German financial daily Handelsblatt; “they will now be shut down very quickly.”

The sudden imposition of “bail-in” will turn that financial crash into mass impoverishment and death for millions who lose everything they have. The early squalls of the storm were seen already in 2012 in the virtual shutdown of the economy of Cyprus due to big bank bail-ins; again in Spain in 2013. This past month’s bank failures and expropriation of 10,000 ordinary citizens has caused a furor in Italy; today it struck Portugal.

Throughout Europe from Jan. 1 onwards there will be, as even Fortune magazine admitted today, “a brutal transfer of wealth on a large scale from one class of people to another” as insolvent banks are bailed in, their depositors and creditors looted to make survival “capital” for the bank.

“Italy is not ready for bail-in,” noted today’s Financial Times — its banking system will crumble from bank runs. Neither is the rest of Europe ready for the bail-in policy which has come down from Brussels and London and the Obama White House, from German Finance Minister Schäuble and his infamous “black zero” austerity.

In the United States it is the hedge funds which are dropping faster and faster as the so-called high-yield credit markets collapse, while Puerto Rico’s debt defaults Jan. 1. Wall Street is ready to blow out, if we do not shut down that casino by government action first.

On Dec. 13, EIR‘s Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche pinpointed the turn, Jan. 1, 2016, into a trans-Atlantic financial blowout, of which so many warnings were appearing yesterday. LaRouche now adds that “when we look at these facts, we should adduce the study of history.”

“The great Renaissance of the 15th Century ended, was crushed, in this way, by a policy of reducing the human population. The Catholic Church at that time was actually an agent of that mass murder, impoverishment, religious warfare.”

The Pope today embraces the scientific fraud of “man-made global warming,” whose aim is to reduce the population.

But it is the Wall Street system which must be shut down. Employ Glass-Steagall now, which has been blocked on Wall Street’s orders since 2010, by Obama and the disgusting Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Shut Wall Street and let the speculators eat their losses, not bail the mass of citizens into them.

We must follow President Franklin Roosevelt in creating Federal credit for new employment and productivity. But first we must do what FDR did to those Wall Street speculators, whose “hatred” he welcomed. It’s them or us.

With just days now until “the catastrophic threat of bank bail-in” becomes reality all over Europe, the warnings are proliferating. “Europe’s Zombie Banks” is the headline of an article in the global edition of Germany’s financial daily Handelsblatt Dec. 29, authored “by Handelsblatt staff” — a major piece. The banks are loaded with bad debts — 400 billion euros of toxic debt in Italy’s banking system alone — and have been kept open by various government bailouts for eight years since the financial crash. Now the European supranational agencies and European Central Bank have decided, as Handelsblatt quotes one senior European diplomat, “We need to get rid of the zombie banks very quickly.”

The chaos started days early, on Dec. 30, when Portugal’s Novo Banco — the already bailed-out “good bank” remains of the entire collapsed Espirito Santo Banking Group — was found 1.4 billion euros short of capital, and the government expropriated that amount from the bank’s bondholders to “recapitalize” it. Instantly, the remaining bondholders “ran” on the bank; the value of Novo Banco’s bonds fell from 94 cents on the dollar in the morning, to 14 cents in the afternoon.

The Financial Times on Dec. 30 noted that Italy, where 10,000 savers were already expropriated in the insolvency of four “zombie banks” smaller than Novo Banco, is “not ready for bail-in.” A Bank of Italy official had already admitted to Parliament that bail-in will trigger “bondholders’ runs” as well as depositors’ runs on banks across the country; the Portugal case today proved it.

Fortune, in a Dec. 30 piece entitled, “Things That Will Go Wrong for Europe in 2016,” stated that “As of January 1, regulators (that’s the ECB [European Central Bank] for most of the banks that matter) will get sweeping new powers to close down insolvent or undercapitalized banks, bailing in even bondholders and large depositors if need be. It’s meant to weed out the zombie banks from the healthy ones. But clean-ups like this invariably mean brutal transfers of wealth from one class to another, causing the kind of political storm hated by governments.”

The article points to Italy and Portugal “impos[ing] losses on retail savers who didn’t read the small print of investment products that they thought were deposits (and thus insured), but turned out to be subordinated debt (which weren’t).” And notes, that the attempt to organize Europe-wide deposit insurance has been brought to a halt by — again — Wolfgang Schaeble’s Germany. Thus in countries like Italy, Portugal, Greece, Spain even the 100,000 euros of depositors’ money is not insured when several, even smaller banks are going under at once.

The financial site ValueWalk posted “The Catastrophic Threat of Bail-In” Dec. 30. “The term — bail-in — describes a scenario in which a bank confiscates private property to indemnify itself for losses it has suffered,” the article explains. “A bail-in is a totally lawless theft of assets.”

This lawlessness, now about to be unleashed throughout the trans-Atlantic economies, will wreak mass impoverishment and death on their inhabitants. The really deadly zombies will walk from Wall Street and the City of London, unless they are shut down.