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Even before the opening bell in New York, Thursday looked like a grim day for some of the giants of global banking.

But few expected the barrage of bad news that soon hit on both sides of the Atlantic -- a rat-a-tat-tat of job cuts, scandal and financial worry that sent bank shares tumbling and left many investors wondering just where or when the pain would end.

It began in Germany, where long-struggling Commerzbank AG unveiled yet another plan to regain its footing, this time by cutting one in five of its employees. In Washington, came still more blistering attacks on John Stumpf, whose grip atop embattled Wells Fargo & Co., the largest U.S. mortgage lender, remains tenuous amid the uproar over a scandal involving unauthorized accounts.

And then, back in Germany, came the bombshell: revelations that some hedge funds were moving to reduce their financial exposure to Deutsche Bank, now the biggest worry in global finance. Before Stumpf left the U.S. House chambers after more than four hours of grilling, news broke his bank would be hit with more penalties after improperly repossessing cars owned by U.S. soldiers.

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The 38-company Bloomberg Europe Banks and Financial Services Index has tumbled 24 percent this year, while the KBW Bank Index of 24 U.S. lenders has slid 4.6 percent, led by Wells Fargo’s 18 percent decline.

In the past 10 days, Stumpf has agreed to forgo $41 million in compensation, and an adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan glibly suggested on Twitter that Turkey buy Deutsche Bank as its market value fell by more than half this year. The German lender is now barely worth more than the $14 billion settlement the U.S. Department of Justice would like to extract in a long-running investigation of the bank’s mortgage securities business.

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Commerzbank Chief Executive Officer Martin Zielke announced plans Thursday to eliminate 9,600 jobs, leaving it no bigger than it was before its 2008 acquisition of Dresdner Bank. The Frankfurt-based bank has lost about 39 percent of its market value this year.

“Germany is still overbanked, and it’s tough to have Germany as your home base when you want to compete with French, Spanish or American peers that operate in less fragmented home markets,” said Klaus Fleischer, a professor of finance at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich.

When the day started this morning, I was thinking that I had overreacted earlier this week, and that perhaps everything would be fine. Today seems to have swung things back in the other direction.

Sharks are circling around the smell of blood in the financial waters.