Pakistan's stock market took the planet's worst financial nose dive today. Its biggest fuel explorer plunged into a barren green hole, and its biggest bank, MCB, plunged 5 percent after being ignominiously being downgraded by Bank of America's Merrill Lynch unit.

Very bad news in the world's seventh most populous country.

For historical value and general amusement/horror, click on the video above for the Karachi Stock Exchange's recent puff piece about what a wonderful opportunity Pakistan is for investors. The truth is that Pakistan's meltdown endangers every other South Asian economy.

Poor Pakistan. Talk about a bubble that's past the bursting point. Schools and colleges have been shut down for a week, and troops are hunting militants thought to be hiding in seminaries in the federal capital, Islamabad, as Dawn reports.

This is a deadly one. You've got a huge country of 176 million people with a storehouse of nuclear weapons, armed to the teeth by the U.S., with Afghanistan and Iran its neighbors on the west, and a state of constant war with neighbor-on-the-east India (the world's second-biggest country).

It's a cauldron of religious mania, the likely staging area for the 9/11 attack and continuing hatred of America by a sizeable amount of its population, and it's in effect ruled by its military. (See my "Arms for the Poor" from April 2005 about the U.S.'s selling of "Lockheed-style democracy" to Pakistan and India for their neverending war.)

Did I mention that millions of Pakistanis are starving? Or that U.S. troops conduct regular invasions of its territory to hunt down Taliban who work both sides of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border?