Mayor Joe Anderson has warned that Liverpool faces its most significant financial challenge since the war - as the council prepares to slice £57m from the city's budget by 2021.
The local authority has £19m to cut before next April, with a minimum of £25m to follow in the next financial year.
Overspends in other areas round out the mammoth amount that has to be cut in a city whose budget has already been reduced by 64 per cent in nine years.
Speaking to the ECHO this morning, Mayor Anderson said he was dreading financial decisions he and other councillors would have to make in the coming months.
He said: "It is a crisis in the sense that we have no way to solve this without getting more money from central government.
"We have to get the message across to them that we are on a cliff edge."
Mayor Anderson said the financial challenges surpassed even the situation faced by the city in the Militant years in the 1980s when the council passed an illegal budget.
He said: "I don't believe this city has faced the financial challenges we face now.
"That includes the post war period and the Militant years in the 1980s."
He also announced that the next full council meeting in September would be fully dedicated to a budget discussion and would follow the creation of an all-party budget group to figure out how to save money most effectively.
Lib Dem leader Richard Kemp welcomed that move and said the situation faced by the city was 'perilous'.
He said: "Not only are there uncertainties created by cuts but also the Comprehensive Spending Review has been delayed for at least a year and councils have no idea how the non-domestic rate collected from businesses will be settled.
"At the same time there are mounting pressures from increasing numbers of children within our care system and from the increasing number of frail elderly.
"We must now look at everything that we do and work out the partnerships and relationships that will enable us to do things both better and more efficiently."
The looming budget cuts are already having an effect, with Mayor Anderson saying this morning that plans to rebuild Tuebrook's Peter Lloyd Leisure Centre have slowed as the council can't afford to service any loan it would require to carry the project out.
And the city's challenges are compounded by other problems.
Officers have effectively abandoned the idea of producing a three-year budget, the more efficient option, because of uncertainty over Brexit and a delay to a government overhaul to local government funding which they say has made long-term planning impossible.
Instead the council will set a budget for the next financial year only, leaving staff with less time to plan for coming years.
More longstanding issues also pose challenges for the authority as it looks to bring in more money to stem the cuts it has to impose.
The city's council tax base is extremely low compared with other parts of the UK, limiting its ability to raise money in one of the few areas it exercises total control over its budget.
By one estimate, while Sussex can raise £6m by raising its council tax by 1%, the same percentage rise in Liverpool would deliver only £1.3m of extra cash.
The council hopes its new housing company Foundations can help to address that problem, with plans to use other financial strategies like Invest to Earn and Invest to Save to help stem the cuts needed elsewhere.
Both policies have been used extensively by the council in previous years.
