The deepening toll from the global financial crisis could trigger the failure of a large US bank within months, a respected former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund claimed today, fuelling another battering for banking shares. Professor Kenneth Rogoff, a leading academic economist, said there was yet worse news to come from the worldwide credit crunch and financial turmoil, particularly in the United States, and that a high-profile casualty among American banks was highly likely. ‘The US is not out of the woods. I think the financial crisis is at the halfway point, perhaps. I would even go further to say the worst is to come,’ Prof Rogoff said at a conference in Singapore. In an ominous warning, he added: ‘We’re not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper, we’re going to see a big one - one of the big investment banks or big banks,’ he said. Rising anxieties over ‘worse to come’ in the credit crisis sent shares tumbling in Europe and Asia. In London, the FTSE 100 index extended opening losses as widespread fears over the financial sector’s woes […]