I have to admit that even I thought there was a great deal of hyperbole involved when Congress was last fall being prodded with scary talk of Armageddon into taking action to "rescue" the financial system.

Now, though, as the Zero Hedge blog reveals in a post entitled "How The World Almost Came To An End At 2PM On September 18," it appears that those giving the warnings were deadly serious.

LiveLeak has caught a scary moment of previously undisclosed insight by Paul Kanjorski where he reveals some facts that have not been captured by the media previously. At 2 minutes and 20 seconds in the video below, Democratic Representative Kanjorski explains how the Federal Reserve told Congress members about a "tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars." According to Kanjorski, this electronic transfer occurred over the period of an hour or two. And it gets worse. Kanjorski paraphrases the following disclosure by Bernanke and Paulson:

More on this topic (What's this?)

How The World Almost Came To An End At 2PM On September 18 (Zero Hedge, 2/8/09)

‘The end of our economic system as we know it’ (Red-Hot Energy and Gold at Money..., 2/9/09)

Steve Keen: "The Roving Cavaliers of Credit" (or Why Ben's Helicopter Will Fail) (naked capitalism, 2/7/09)

Read more on Federal Reserve at Wikinvest

On Thursday (Sept 18), at 11am the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the U.S., to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic out there.

If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2pm that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.

We are no better off today than we were 3 months ago because we have a decrease in the equity positions of banks because other assets are going sour by the moment.

Interestingly, Kanjorski, and likely more and more Democrats, are starting to shift to the camp that more time is needed to make a correct decision this time (which may explain Geithner's decision to postpone the "bank-rescue" announcement by one day to Tuesday), instead of rushing into another half-baked plan. Very scary stuff.