Recession May Be Deeper Than Forecast, Experts Say : Economy: Irvine conference told that recovery may not come until the fall, or even later.

The national recession will be deeper and the recovery may take longer than some experts’ earlier forecasts, several economists and local business leaders said Thursday.

“The war in the Gulf has deepened and made (the recession) longer,” said Richard W. Rahn, chief economist for the Chamber of Commerce of the United States and an outside economic adviser to President Bush. “I’m skeptical that the economy will turn around in the spring.”

Rahn and several other speakers at a business outlook conference in Irvine said they expect the recession to continue at least until the fall.

But one panelist was even more pessimistic. Richard M. Rodnick, a Newport Beach management consultant and former chairman of the Geneva Cos., an Irvine mergers and acquisitions firm, said the recession will cast a pall on the U.S. economy through the second quarter of 1992.

Rodnick was one of the speakers featured at the Irvine ’91 Business Outlook Conference, an annual event sponsored by the Irvine Chamber of Commerce.

The panelists said this is the first recession that is being led by problems plaguing U.S. financial institutions--savings and loans, banks and major insurance companies. Those institutions’ problems have been aggravated by the declining real estate market, they said.

James Doti, a Chapman College economist, has said that a recession began in Orange County in the fourth quarter of 1990. The downturn will be mild, he predicted, with a recovery beginning in late spring or early summer.

Several panelists said Thursday that Orange County’s economy will be insulated from the worst effects of the recession nationally. They said that the market for very high-priced homes will remain strong but that the medium-priced housing market will continue to be soft for the next two years.

Rodnick said the county’s defense industry should benefit when the Pentagon resupplies military hardware that is being used in the Persian Gulf War. “I see the orders coming as early as the next quarter,” he said.

Dennis J. Aigner, dean of UCI’s Graduate School of Management, added that the county’s substantial trade with Pacific Rim nations will cushion the local effects of the recession. The Pacific Rim is not expected to be deeply affected by the U.S. recession, so trading between American firms and the region should remain brisk, he said.

Another factor helping the local economy is the strong presence of Japanese high-tech companies, which have created jobs and helped offset cuts in the defense industry, said Robert K. Sayed, conference chairman.