IPSWICH — Americans and their government are financially overextended and can no longer borrow their way out trouble. The only immediate hope is that President-elect Barack Obama's stimulus package will pump some liquidity into the economy.
That was the message from a quartet of speakers at yesterday's annual North Shore Chamber of Commerce Economic and Public Policy Forum at the Ipswich Country Club.
Seldom was heard an encouraging word.
"The economy is in desperate need of a lifeline," Rosalin Acosta, executive vice president and managing director of wealth management at Sovereign Bank, told the room crowded with several hundred business leaders.
Things definitely could get worse, Acosta said, but noted current conditions aren't as bad as they were in the early 1980s.
Then, she said, the prime rate hit 20.5 percent, and unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent.
Richard Holbrook, chairman and CEO of Danversbank, said the housing crisis could be blamed on two things, easy credit being one.
The other was the false belief home prices would continue to rise, "unreasonably, forever," Holbrook said.
Both consumers and financial institutions are over-leveraged, Holbrook said, and the federal government is the only entity with the ability to pump liquidity into the economy.
"I like to think of debt as a mountain," he said. "Standing shoulder to shoulder, we got the boulder to the top of the mountain, now it's coming down. Government can't stop it, but it can slow it down."
Holbrook said he thinks we'll look back and call this the Great Recession, the worst one since the Depression.
Robert Lutts, president and chief investment officer of Cabot Money Management, said the debt mountain in the economy is astronomical, but said there will be a turnaround eventually, and with all the money the government is borrowing to finance stimulus packages, we'll be faced with a new problem then.
"Inflation?" he said. "Remember the '80s. Watch out, watch out."
Costa said there is a "crisis of confidence" ruling people's financial decisions, and Kevin Bottomley, president and CEO of Danversbank, concurred.
He recalled Franklin Delano Roosevelt's observation that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and urged fellow business people, "don't go into the bunker," because opportunities will eventually surface.
Holbrook said the economy won't turn around until housing prices stabilize and unemployment drops.
"We're months away from both those bottoms," he said.
Bottomley said one advantage we have in Massachusetts is a strong banking system. He noted, "We have not curtailed our credit lines," and good customers can get loans.
But if there was a theme to the morning's forum, it was that both as individuals and as a country, we've done way too much borrowing already.
"People want everything today before they can afford it," Bottomley said. "They're unwilling to wait until they save enough to afford it."
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