Bill Gross: ‘Beware Our Shadow Banking System’
Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2007 10:59 a.m. EST

Bond fund manager Bill Gross has this disturbing thing to say about the subprime disaster: It’s nothing less than the collapse of our banking system.
It can be easy to underestimate the impact of the mortgage mess or to conclude that the economy can absorb it all and move on, as it did after the junk bond mess, the dot-com bubble or similar financially engineered collapses of years past.

This is different, says Gross, writing in Fortune magazine.

"What we are witnessing is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August,â€