2008 Mortgage Business to Decline 18 Pct

The nation’s more than $2 trillion home mortgage business won’t halt its current slide anytime soon, with mortgage originations expected to fall 18 percent next year and decline another 6 percent in 2009, the Mortgage Bankers Association predicts.

And although a forecast to be released Wednesday at the organization’s annual convention offers no hope that a housing turnaround is near, the industry still foresees a future for the subprime market that helped trigger the broader downturn, the MBA’s chief economist said. It will come back, Doug Duncan said in an interview in which he described a shift to far stricter lending standards for people with spotty credit.

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