Last year, when addressing the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, Stuart Hoffman gave a much rosier assessment of 2008 economically than what panned out for the year.

"What a difference a year makes," he told the Economics Club of Pittsburgh during the annual forecast luncheon yesterday. "I must confess, there were a few things I neglected to tell you."

It was a light moment in an otherwise dark forecast for which Mr. Hoffman, the chief economist for PNC Financial gave his "high level executive summary" as "The economy sucks. It's going to get worse before it gets better and it's not getting better any time soon."

Some of his specifics were that the national economy would continue to lag for the next six months, possibly pulling up in the second half of the year.

"In all seriousness it will, in the immediate future, at least in the first half of this year, it will get worse," he said. Even if the economy turns around in the summer, "it will make it the longest recession of the post-war period."

While Mr. Hoffman addressed the national and local economies, his counterpart at Bank of New York/Mellon, Richard Hoey, talked about the economy on a global basis, which was just as gloomy.

"The bad news is this financial crisis probably was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. However, we're not going to have another depression."

He said the current recession is more like two recessions stuck together, one mild recession that started in the first nine months of 2008 followed by the waterfall of the economy that started in October and has not yet let up.

He listed the areas of the world that are in recession with the US: the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, China, and non-Japanese Asia: "They cancelled the global boom and called it the global bust," he said.

He said companies all over the world will start to follow the lead of Chrysler, which idled all of its factories for a month to reduce inventory.

"This is what you're going to see in the economic numbers over the next couple of months as the world slows industrial production," he said.

Mr. Hoey said the U.S. will start to come out of the recession, in part because the impatience of the American people has demanded action by the federal government. While many of the actions taken have acted just to keep the economy moving, the purchase of mortgage-backed securities by the federal government has actually helped improve the housing market, which needs to recover in order to save the rest of the economy.

"My forecast is you will all feel much, much better by the end of 2009, but you're going to be scared to death in the meantime," Mr. Hoey told the gathering.

Locally, the forecast was better for this bust because the Pittsburgh economy never really boomed.

For instance, a chart from PNC shows that in the second quarter of 2005 housing prices nationally had increased by an average of 12 percent over the same quarter in 2004. Yet that in that same quarter in Pittsburgh, housing prices were up about 4.5 percent. Then, in the third quarter of 2008, as housing prices in the rest of the country fell by an average of 4 percent over the third quarter in 2007, the Pittsburgh market saw prices rise during that same time by 2 percent.

Unemployment has been lower in Pittsburgh, which posted a rate of 5.8 percent in November, than it has been for the nation, which was 6.7 percent for that same month.

Mr. Hoffman said he expected unemployment to grow nationally to 8.5 percent while Pittsburgh remains below that at a high of 7.5 percent.

But, he said, nationally the trade deficit has dropped significantly. November posted a record for a single month drop in the trade deficit at $17 billion. That can be accounted for, in part, by the drop in oil prices, which for every penny drop in the price of a barrel of oil translates to $1 billion saved by Americans at the gasoline stations. He said the deficit also fell because US consumers are buying less.

Fewer autos are coming in, and there are fewer imports from China. He said the consumer price index is also dropping, in part because airfares are down, as are the costs of hotel rooms, clothing and jewelry.

The dropping prices combined with a federal economic stimulus plan that will put money into infrastructure projects as well as food stamps and education will also help in the next year.

Mr. Hoffman also said that after the economy regains some traction from the stimulus plan, the federal government has to be very careful as it stops spending not to kill what it has accomplished.

He said the federal government has to be very careful as it withdraws life support from the economy because "corpses never to well, no matter how much you feed and exercise them."