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Soaring mortgage default rates this year already have shaken major financial institutions and the fallout from more of them, some experts say, could spread from those already battered banks into the general economy.
The worst-case scenario is anyone's guess, but some believe it could become very bad.
"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."
A recent FCC report promoted by Kevin Martin, the agency's chairman, found that cable TV reaches a wide enough U.S. audience to trigger a rule within a 1984 law that would give the government significant new powers to ensure program diversity.
But a majority of the agency's five-member commission said the report endorsed flawed data and should have used other sources. Some said they weren't even aware of the agency's own numbers until Monday night.
"Our job of ascertaining the facts is made more difficult because the draft cherry picked the only data that justified the outcome apparently desired while suppressing other data," Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said.
A recent FCC report promoted by Kevin Martin, the agency's chairman, found that cable TV reaches a wide enough U.S. audience to trigger a rule within a 1984 law that would give the government significant new powers to ensure program diversity.
But a majority of the agency's five-member commission said the report endorsed flawed data and should have used other sources. Some said they weren't even aware of the agency's own numbers until Monday night.
"Our job of ascertaining the facts is made more difficult because the draft cherry picked the only data that justified the outcome apparently desired while suppressing other data," Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said.
