Speakers at the University of West Georgia’s Economic Forecast Breakfast tried to look on the bright side, but their forecasts echoed the drizzly weather outside – rain today, but the sun may come out tomorrow.

“This is not a good year,” said Dr. Donald Ratajczak, a professor of J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. “Wait until tomorrow; tomorrow meaning next year. Tomorrow eventually gets here.”

In the past year, regulators closed three banks in the five-county area of West Georgia. Housing starts are at historic lows, down nearly 82 percent in Carroll County and nearly 71 percent in Haralson County from 2008, which was already a bad year. Foreclosures continue to rise and are now moving into the wealthier neighborhoods and conventional loans. In Carroll County, one in 38 houses are bank owned and auctioned properties and in Haralson County, 1 in 49 households are in foreclosure, more than double last year’s rate. That has also led to high vacancy rates.

Much of the foreclosure activity is localized in Carroll County.

“If you add the foreclosures in Temple and Villa Rica together, that makes up more than half the foreclosures for the county,” said Dr. William “Joey” Smith, professor of economics at UWG.

However, there are some signs of stabilization, if not recovery. The local building permit decline is slowing, Smith said.

“In fact, they have to,” he said. “Existing home sales in the South, in the southern counties have actually started to kick up a bit. They’re on a six-month trend in the upper direction.”

Ratajczak agreed the market is stabilizing. Housing values have dropped 33 percent and housing is now very affordable – if a consumer can get a loan. However, both still warn that the housing market will continue to be a drag on the economy in 2010. Stabilization does not necessarily mean improvement.

The unemployment rates also seem to be stabilizing, decreasing very slightly in the last couple of months locally, but still at 30-year highs and still over 10 percent.

This year, the state lost 6 percent of its jobs. Carroll County lost 4.5 percent of its jobs, a total of 1,744, the vast majority, 1,201, from manufacturing after the closing of Carlisle and Pilgrim’s Pride layoffs. Haralson County fared even worse, losing 6.7 percent or 526 of its jobs, the majority because of the closing the Ball Inc., a manufacturing plant in Tallapoosa.

The bright spot in the Carroll County employment picture has been health care and social assistance, which increased 11 percent mainly due to the opening of Willowbrooke at Tanner, a behavioral health facility in Villa Rica. In Haralson County, small businesses are creating jobs. In the west Georgia region, food service has held its own over the past year.

In the last two recessions, it has been the consumer who pulled the economy out of the recession, but this time that probably won’t happen.

Consumer confidence is still down. Although it was on the rise through September, it fell again in October. Last year, consumers pulled back during the Christmas season and forecasters believe they will follow the same pattern this year.

“The consumer still has some work to do,” Ratajczak said. “At the height of it, they lost 23 percent of their wealth. Now, there has been some wealth rebuilding. So, it has gone up since March but they’re still down about 16 percent on their wealth.”

At the same time, nationwide 40 percent of companies have frozen wages. That means the consumer is putting more money aside in savings and spending less. In addition, oil prices are being driven up by investors who, stressed by the falling value of the dollar, are looking for alternative investments, which means that at least temporarily oil prices will be an inflationary influence on the economy.

However, corporate America could be poised to pull the country out of the recession.

Many large, non-financial American companies have pulled through this rough economy by cutting marginal operations and expenses to become more productive and potentially more lucrative. The stagnant wages, while not good for the American worker, do mean that the United States is becoming more competitive with European and Japanese companies.

All of this means the foundations are being laid for a future economic recovery.

“If someone tells me, ‘Are we going to have 4 percent growth in 2010?’ I’m going to laugh at him,” Ratajczak said. “If someone tells me, ‘Are we going to have growth of 4 percent in 2011?’ I’m going to say, ‘Why not? And it can even be higher than that.’”