美国一位知名房地产专家昨日警告，如果美国房价继续下跌，将再次对经济造成像当 前信贷紧缩那样程度的冲击。

Fresh economic shocks on the scale of the current credit squeeze will occur if US house prices continue to fall, one of the country’s leading housing experts warned yesterday.

耶鲁大学(Yale University)经济学家罗伯特?席勒(Robert Shiller)向一个美国国会小组表示，他担心“此次房价崩溃可能成为自大萧条(Great Depression)以来最严重的一次”。

Robert Shiller, a Yale university economist, told a US congressional panel that he feared “the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression”.

他向参议院联合经济委员会表示：“房价下跌将造成未来的混乱局面，就像我们刚刚经历的信贷危机那样。”

“The decline in house prices stands to create future dislocations, like the credit crisis we have just seen,” he told the Senate’s joint economic committee.

上述警告突显出一种日益普遍的观点，即金融市场动荡和信贷环境收紧，是美国房地产市场暴跌的早期结果。目前美国房地产市场的下跌趋势正在加快。

The warning underlines an increasingly widespread view that the turmoil in financial markets and tightening lending conditions are early consequences of a slump in the US housing market that is gathering momentum.