One of the top officials at one of the top credit rating agencies in the world publicly declared on television that "Greece will default very shortly."

Moritz Kraemer, the head of S&P's European sovereign ratings unit, made the following statement on Bloomberg Television on Monday: "Greece will default very shortly. . .That should chill you to your bones.

If the EU allows Greece to default, that would be a signal to investors that the EU would allow Italy, Spain and Portugal to all default someday too.

Confidence in the bonds of those countries would disintegrate and bond yields would go through the roof.

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After U.S. financial markets closed on Friday, S&P announced credit downgrades for nine European nations

Over the past several months we have seen quite a few credit downgrades all over Europe, but we have never seen anything quite like what S&P just did. . .

In addition, there was another really, really troubling piece of news that came out of Europe on Friday.

It was announced that negotiations between the Greek government and private holders of Greek debt have broken down. . .

Already there are indications that foreigners are starting to dump large amounts of U.S. debt. If this trickle becomes a flood things could become very bad for the United States very quickly.

We are on the verge of some very bad things. The kinds of "financial bombs" that we saw dropped today are going to become much more frequent. As governments, banks and investors scramble to survive, we are going to see extreme amounts of volatility in the financial marketplace.

Things are not going to be "normal" again for a really, really long time.

Hold on tight, because 2012 is going to be a very interesting year.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Huge Financial Bombs Just Got Dropped All Over Europe