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American Economy Meltdown
   
For months, the American economy has been assailed by a wave of troubling news, from plunging housing prices to the soaring cost of oil, provoking gloomy talk of a possible recession. Yet so far the economy has found a way to shrug it all off and keep growing.
How much longer can the expansion carry on As a new year unfolds, analysts expect a verdict soon: Either the negatives finally metastasize and drag the economy down, or a fresh source of growth emerges, helping to sustain consumer spending despite the ongoing worries about housing and tight credit.
“There are even odds of a recession,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “It literally could go either way.”
The year that just ended was not for the faint of heart. As mortgage debt became synonymous with toxic waste, banks got spooked and tightfisted. Job growth slowed. Inflation fears grew. Still, consumers kept spending, and unemployment stayed flat. American companies found enough sales abroad to compensate for weakness at home.
The bursting housing bubble remains a locus of concern. An era of free-flowing credit and speculation has led to a far-flung empire of vacant, unsold homes — 2.1 million, or about 2.6 percent of the nation’s housing stock, Mr. Zandi said. Even in the worst years of recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s, the share of vacant homes did not exceed 1.9 percent.
This assemblage of unsold properties will not be whittled down to normal levels, economists suggest, until national home prices fall by at least 15 percent from their peak, reached in the summer of 2006. So far, prices have dropped a little more than 5 percent, according to the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home price index.
The glut could be exacerbated if an already alarming wave of foreclosures continues to broaden, claiming even those with supposedly good credit.
Last year, the trouble in the mortgage market was largely confined to subprime loans extended to homeowners with weak credit. Nearly one-fourth of such loans were in default as of November, according to data from First American LoanPerformance and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Though default rates on loans to homeowners with relatively good credit are far lower, they are rising sharply, too. In November, 6.6 percent of so-called Alt-A home loans — those deemed somewhat less risky than subprime — were either delinquent by 60 days or more, in foreclosure, or had been repossessed. That was up from 4.3 percent in August.
This is a potentially ominous sign, because subprime and Alt-A mortgages issued in 2006 together made up about 40 percent of all mortgages. Like many of the subprime loans that have landed in trouble, Alt-A loans often begin with a low introductory interest rate that later escalates.
The spike in foreclosures is happening even before many mortgages have reset to higher rates, suggesting that borrowers are falling behind because their homes are worth less. Many are having trouble refinancing as banks tighten lending standards.
All of which explains why many economists expect national housing prices to fall by 5 to 10 percent more in 2008, and perhaps into 2009 as well, before hitting bottom.
Such a drop could ripple out to the broader economy by depressing consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of all economic activity.
“It’s almost inconceivable that there won’t be severe constraints on the U.S. consumer economy,” said Bernard Connolly, chief global strategist at Banque AIG in London.
Through the recent era of multiplying housing prices, Americans have turned increased home values into cash via sales, refinanced mortgages and home equity loans — more than $800 billion a year from 2004 to 2006, according to several analysts. The pace of this flow has slowed sharply in recent months.
Fierce debate centers on how much of that money winds up financing consumer purchases, but estimates suggest that every dollar of lost housing value is likely to constrain 5 to 10 cents of spending by consumers that otherwise would have taken place over the next year or two. That could be enough to turn an expansion into an recession.
Forecasting the demise of consumer spending, however, is notoriously risky. The willingness of Americans to spend, whatever the size of their debts, seems to transcend the rules of economics
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