Real estate mogul and billionaire Sam Zell expects the next U.S. economic downturn to be a “significantly milder version” of the 2008 recession.

Zell told Bloomberg TV in December that he thought “there is a high probability that we are looking at a recession in the next 12 months.”

Zell said Wednesday at New York University’s annual REIT Symposium that he thought his prediction was “realistic” at the time. He said the U.S. economy “at the moment is doing pretty well,” but said “we’re in the ninth inning” of the current economic cycle, the Real Deal reported.

“You have to look at the U.S. as part of a connected and globalized world,” Zell said, noting all of the volatile economic hot spots and uncertainty around the globe.

Turning to politics, he called the current presidential candidates a crop of “idiots” and noted that President Barack Obama as the “number one idiot,” the Real Deal’s Rey Mashayekhi reported.

Zell described Donald Trump an “enormous wildcard,” but said he would “have to see whether his campaign becomes any more real” before passing more specific judgment, the Real Deal reported.

“His thesis of, ‘It’s going to be great, trust me’ – I’ve been to that movie.”

For his part, Trump himself recently predicted a "very massive recession" soon in the United States, saying that "it’s a terrible time right now" to invest in the stock market — though he claimed that he could eliminate the nation's $19 trillion debt "over a period of eight years."

"I think we’re sitting on an economic bubble," he told The Washington Post. "A financial bubble."

(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).

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