Economy waiting for consumers

California's economy will be weighed down by the national recession until late 2009 and will begin to recover as construction rebounds and consumers start spending again, according to a UCLA Anderson Forecast released today. Gregory J. Wilcox in the Daily News.

The new quarterly forecast is the gloomiest in at least four years from Anderson economists, who said the pullback in spending by worried consumers - which they called "the spectacular panic of 2008" - triggered a nose dive in employment.

"The news from the economy is bad. The recession that we had previously hoped to avoid is now with us in full gale force," David Shulman, a senior economist at the Anderson forecast, said in his assessment for the nation.