Joseph Granville and Robert Stovall, octogenarians who’ve seen every financial market downturn since the 1950s, say the current one may be the worst and is far from over.

Granville, born in 1923, remembers his banker father’s bad moods following the stock-market crash of 1929. The younger Granville began his career at defunct brokerage E.F. Hutton in 1957, quit in 1963 to begin publishing a weekly newsletter and wrote nine books on investing.

“We’re in a crash,” Granville, 84, said in a telephone interview from Kansas City, Missouri, where he lives and works. “This is the worst I’ve seen, and I’ve studied every bit of history all my life.”

U.S. stocks plunged to the lowest since July 2006 today after JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s purchase of Bear Stearns Cos. for less than a 10th of its market value sent financial shares falling around the world. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index neared a so-called bear market drop of 20 percent from its Oct. 9 record.

Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest securities firm and once the biggest underwriter of U.S. mortgage bonds, collapsed as the residential real-estate slump led to bank losses approaching $200 billion globally.

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