This is going to be a bad one.

"We haven't faced a downturn like this since the Depression," said Bill Gross, chief investment officer of PIMCO, the world's biggest bond fund. He's not suggesting anything like those terrible times — but, as an expert on the global credit crisis, he speaks with authority.

"Its effect on consumption, its effect on future lending attitudes, could bring us close to the zero line in terms of economic growth," he said. "It does keep me up at night."

Some 2 million homeowners hold $600 billion of subprime adjustable-rate mortgage loans, known as ARMs, that are due to reset at higher amounts during the next eight months.

Subprime loans are those made to people with poor credit. Not all these mortgages are in trouble, but homeowners who default or fall behind on payments could cause an economic shock of a type never seen before.

Some of the nation's leading economic minds lay out a scenario that is frightening. Not only would the next wave of the mortgage crisis force people out of their homes, it might also spiral throughout the economy.

The thing that upsets me the most about this kind of news is just how predictable it was. Anybody with any real common sense should have seen that turning into a country of borrowers would someday end in a huge debt landing on our doorstep. As a nation we simply owe more then we make.

I have to wonder if some of the support for Hillary Clinton is not from people desperate to have Bill helping to steer the economy back to the stability we enjoyed in the mid and late 1990's.