The 10 Scariest Doomsday Predictions About a Default

Oct. 10, 2013— -- intro: The government shutdown of 2013 has left hundreds of thousands of workers furloughed, curtailed government services, shuttered national parks and rattled the markets.

But on or around Oct. 17 -- the deadline the Obama administration has set for raising the nation's borrowing limit -- it could all get a lot worse. Economists of all political stripes have warned of the disastrous consequences of a debt default, including a stock market plunge, sky-high interest rates and a major disruption in the global economy.

"In the event that a debt limit impasse were to lead to a default, it could have a catastrophic effect on not just financial markets but also on job creation, consumer spending and economic growth -- with many private-sector analysts believing that it would lead to events of the magnitude of late 2008 or worse, and the result then was a recession more severe than any seen since the Great Depression," according to a Treasury Department report released last week.

Some members of Congress, mostly Republicans, have quibbled over the date the nation can no longer pay its bills. Still other lawmakers say a default wouldn't be all that bad.

Debt Default Deadline Debated as Date Looms

Such lingering doubts notwithstanding, doomsday predictions about the consequences of a default are everywhere these days. ABC News has compiled some of the scariest of the bunch:

quicklist:title: 1. Experts Warn of 'Financial Apocalypse' text: Yalman Onaran, senior writer at Bloomberg News, recently wrote that a U.S. default could cause "an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen."

"Failure by the world's largest borrower to pay its debt -- unprecedented in modern history -- will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression," Onaran said.

"Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse."

quicklist:title: 2. Warren Buffett Likens Default to 'Nuclear Bombs'text: In an interview with Fortune magazine last Friday, billionaire Warren Buffett, spoke out against politicians' fighting over the debt ceiling for political gain.

"It ought to be banned as a weapon," Buffett said of the default politics. "It should be like nuclear bombs, basically too horrible to use."

Buffet also discussed the looming fiscal crisis on CNBC's Squawk Box, alongside former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and argued that playing politics with the debt limit" won't work long term." The billionaire investor said, "If [Republicans] can't get their way on another issue, they'll use the threat of, in effect, defaulting on the government's credit to get their way."

quicklist:title: 3. Goldman Sachs Predicts a 'Rapid' Economic Downturntext: Goldman Sachs economists, Alec Phillips and Kris Dawsey, released a 13-page research note Oct. 5 that projected, "halting Treasury payments would slash the growth of gross domestic product by 4.2 percentage points over a year."