Sounding more like dot-bomb everyday

Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial took some time off from selling his Countrywide stock to talk with Maria Bartiromo at CNBC in a video that many of you have probably already seen by now. If not, here's a link.

Maria brought up the "R" word and Angelo was only too happy to drive home the point that things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better:

"I don't see a light here at the moment."

"This is one of the greatest panics I've ever seen in 55 years in financial services."

"I can't believe that when you're having this level of delinquencies and foreclosures - home equity is gone - the tide has gone out - it will have a material affect on the psyche of the American people and their wallet"

However, more than anything else, the Countrywide chief appears to be talking like IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco about six or seven years ago - well into the acceptance phase of the process, trying to figure out how to emerge from the current crisis and pick up market share in a much smaller market.

"But at the end of the day, we could be doing very substantial volume with high quality loans because there's nobody else in town. Although the pie will be smaller, I think we'll get a bigger part of the pie".

Countrywide currently employs 61,000 less the 500 that were let go last Friday.

At the technology company that I worked for, about half the heads were lopped off over a period of about two years when dot-com turned into dot-bomb.

What's the Countrywide headcount likely to be a year or two from now?

Any word on all those Countrywide office buildings under construction in Ventura County?