“The housing market is going to be exceptionally weak for some time,” guest speaker Richard Kaglic warned members of the Beaufort County Committee of 100.

Housing prices have declined and, though homes are more affordable now, unemployment still is an issue for buyers č and banks have tougher lending standards in this post-Great Recession environment, Kaglic shared.

“The good news is it can’t get much worse in the housing market,” he said.

The further good news is housing is no longer a barrier to wider economic growth, the economist said.

Addressing a luncheon session at the Washington Civic Center, Kaglic said he does expect to see an uptick in new home construction, but he indicated that growth isn’t likely to boom any time soon.

He pointed out around 400,000 new housing units are added to the United States annually. The housing-demolition rate comes to about 300,000 structures a year, Kaglic added.

Responding to an audience member’s question about the housing market, he said, “If I intoned any sense of optimism, it was a mistake.”

Yet, according to Kaglic, there are signs the economy is moving forward despite rising energy prices, world-shaking political and military strife in the Middle East and North Africa and the earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan.

“Folks are quite rightly a little more cautious than they had been in the beginning of the year,” he said.

But the recovery now is less driven by federal stimulus dollars and other government intervention than by personal consumption and investment, he related.

This consumer-driven stimulus is more sustainable over time, Kaglic told his audience of business and community leaders.

Durable-goods sales recently were up or flat, and “that’s pretty good for the manufacturing sector,” Kaglic continued.

“So what we’re seeing is a fairly modest increase but a very broad-based improvement,” he said.

Stronger demand for new manufacturing orders means businesses will be encouraged to hire additional workers, Kaglic observed.

“We’re starting to see business activity slowly but surely rebound,” he said.

Businesses are starting to spend more on equipment and computer software, Kaglic said.

Though the U.S. added 216,000 net, new private-sector jobs in March, that job-addition pace isn’t enough to rapidly replace jobs lost in the recession, he acknowledged.

At the rate of 216,000 jobs per month, it would take the U.S. the next three years to get back to prerecession employment levels, he said.

This country shed approximately 8.8 million jobs during the downturn, Kaglic reported.

Taking a more local tack, Kaglic said North Carolina’s population continued to grow despite the recession.

This means the state’s unemployment numbers are higher than they might have been with less population growth.

But, in time, population expansion will put the state in a better position as industries look to relocate or expand here, he suggested.

Kaglic cautioned his opinions were his own and not those of the government.

Invited here to speak by the Committee of 100, Kaglic travels throughout his office’s multi-state region to speak to people about the economy and get their input on the Fed’s actions. This input gets conveyed up the ladder to Richmond, Va., and Washington, D.C., he said.

Kaglic was introduced by Tom Thompson, Beaufort County’s chief economic developer.

Kaglic has been with the Fed for more than nine years, Thompson said.