WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 12, 2008--With stock and house prices falling and Congress considering a new fiscal stimulus package and exploring additional bailouts, is an end to the financial turmoil in sight? At an AEI event on October 30, a panel of experts offered their opinions on the current state of the housing crisis and speculated about when the housing market.will finally bottom out. The consensus? It will be a while yet.

Falling economic indicators and the continued slowdown in the housing and credit markets, both in the United States and abroad, have given the panelists reason to believe that the nadir of the housing crisis is still to come. Predictions of when markets would reach their bottom varied from third quarter 2009 to sometime in 2010. New York University economist Nouriel Roubini said that "for the last few months, people have always been calling the bottom. . . . They said it after Bear Stearns, after Fannie and Freddie, after AIG, after TARP [the Troubled Assets Relief Program] . . . and each time markets have rallied for a little bit and then gone further south. . . . Unfortunately, I don't think we're at the bottom."