‘A line-up of prominent finance and commercial real estate leaders addressed today’s volatile economic climate at the eighth annual Trigild Lender Conference, and came to a common consensus: “The worst is yet to come.” Most agreed that the situation will not start to improve until the first quarter of 2010,’ Business Wire reported Wednesday.

‘Experts at the event named the credit crunch as the primary culprit in the commercial and residential real estate meltdown, as a record-breaking crowd of leaders in the finance, legal and real estate industries convened in downtown San Diego for the annual event, held Oct. 22-24.’

“Until the credit markets ease, the economy will be extraordinarily strained,” said keynote speaker Sam Chandan, Ph.D., chief economist and senior vice president of research for New York City-based Reis Inc. “Constraints on credit diminish consumer’s capacity to spend, which affects all industries,” he added.

Conerly Consulting LLC and chief economist of abcInvesting.com added: “Banks do not make bad loans in bad times, only in good times… Banks are nervous, as half of the assets in the whole banking system are real estate related.” The outcome, he said, is still a “mystery. We don’t know how much bank sheets have been compromised by all this.”

In short: the crisis will continue to grow in the coming weeks, possibly months. Banks are still not confident, there are still a lot of major obstacles to overcome.

However, the fact that Western and Asian government have acted in recent weeks should limit the damage somewhat. If they would not have acted, the collapse of world economies would have been swift and brutal. Many people are still suffering, with jobs being lost, consumers spending less, etc., but the moves of governments everywhere to limit the fallout has already paid off in so far that we now see experts talking about whether the crisis will get (a bit) worse or whether markets will recover reasonably soon again. If governments would have refrained from acting, we would not be talking about how to revive economies now, we would only be talking about how all markets were collapsing and lives were being destroyed.

Government policies need to be given time to have effect, resulting in banks starting to loan to companies, individuals and each other again, and, when this happens, the fallout could be relatively mild. Today’s crisis will still be one of the worst in history, but nothing like the Great Depression that destroyed entire economies in the 1930s. The lessons, it seems, we had to learn from past crisis were indeed learned.

At least, that is where we stand now. Since we’re talking about the economy, and since the world’s most reknown economists all gladly admit that it’s impossible to predict what will happen in the future, it could all be very different months, even weeks, from now. If banks continue to refuse loaning to each other, the crisis will deepen.