The indicators are all there: Unemployment is up, housing starts and home values are down, manufacturing in the United States is struggling, and the stock market recently lost $1 trillion in value in one day.

Meanwhile, the price of gasoline remains high, and New England residents are entering winter facing sky-high home heating oil prices.

People can't get car loans or mortgages without near-perfect credit, a high down payment and rising interest rates, and more and more people are losing their homes to foreclosure.

Recession, depression, inflation — no matter what you call it, the economy, and many Massachusetts and New Hampshire residents, are hurting.

Unfortunately, this downturn may go on for a while, local experts say, despite Friday's approval by Congress of a $700 billion plan to rescue some of the banks and financial institutions hard hit by the plummeting real estate market.

Some experts compare the current situation to the stock market crash of 1987, which led to a four- or five-year recession.

Others say it's more like the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s, which began with the failure of some of its large banks and investment houses. That is eerily similar to what just happened in the United States, with the collapses of Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Japan suffered through a 10-year economic downturn following its crisis.

Most say it's a stretch to compare today's circumstances to the Great Depression of the 1930s, which lasted until the start of World War II. The stock market in that case didn't recover until 1943 — 14 years after the crash.

Bob Cuomo, dean of the Girard Business School at Merrimack College, said that even with passage of the bailout bill, he expects the economy to struggle for at least the next couple of years.

He said conditions are "not as bad as 1929 — that was a full-blown depression." But he said this will be worse than the 1987 crash, because of the subprime mortgage mess, which has poisoned the financial system.

Cuomo believes the current conditions are more analogous to the Japanese banking crisis.

The Japanese banking crisis was preceded by skyrocketing residential real estate values, similar to what has happened in the United States since the early 1990s. The rise in real estate was followed by a collapse of Japan's central banks, which is also similar to what happened here.

"They started from a high mountain, so the fall was more precipitous," Cuomo said.

When Japanese lawmakers went to bail out those big banks, there was an enormous hue and cry from Japanese citizens, who claimed that taxpayer money shouldn't be used to help unscrupulous bankers.

The crisis there lasted a full decade and was resolved only after the government injected billions of dollars into the Japanese banking system.

Bailout should help

Bill Ryan of Ryan Financial Services of Andover noted that just about every financial crisis in this country has been preceded by some kind of abuse of the marketplace.

He said in the years leading up to the Great Depression, "we had a completely make-believe stock market" perpetrated by people selling stock in companies that didn't exist.

Ryan said the 1987 stock market debacle was preceded by a 5 percent overall rise in the stock market, but abuses in the real estate and junk bond markets led to the implosion in October of that year.

"Downturns like this always follow abuses," he said. "This time, we certainly had real estate abuses with excess lending."

Tom Grella Sr. of Grella Financial Services in Methuen feels the best comparison is to the 1987 crash.

"Although the circumstances of this market are different, the end result is the same — a high level of fear and anxiety," he said. "In the market crash of 1987, the stock market fell 30 percent. This time, it's different. It's serious, but the market is trading."

Most of those interviewed believe the crisis will be blunted due to the passage of the bailout bill, even though the stock market took a turn for the worse immediately following the vote.

"The bailout package will restore confidence in the economy," said Gerald Mulligan, president of Riverbank, which has branches throughout the Merrimack Valley and Southern New Hampshire. "Consumer confidence is the most important element to the economy."

Merrimack College's Cuomo agreed.

He said the bill "provides liquidity" in the financial system, which enables companies to borrow money to meet payroll so that people have jobs. It also helps people borrow at reasonable interest rates so they can build an addition on their home, buy a new home, purchase a car or pick up new appliances.

Down on Main Street

Already, the Wall Street calamity has trickled down to the local level.

Charlie Daher, president and CEO of Commonwealth Motors in Lawrence, said even people with good credit are having a hard time getting car loans with decent interest rates.

"People who could buy cars six months ago can't get bank loans," he said. "The banks have moved the bar up on the credit score, so that the same people who would have qualified a year ago aren't qualifying now."

Those who do qualify are paying higher interest rates.

"People with lower credit scores, the banks are making them pay more," Daher said. "If they want to pay $300 a month, they have to pay $330 a month or more."

Ryan said he heard one story about a woman with perfect credit who was seeking to buy a house in Connecticut. The bank reviewed her application, said she had a great credit rating, then offered her a loan with an 11 percent interest rate.

"No one would pay 11 percent for a mortgage," he said. "There needs to be some type of willingness on the part of lending institutions to start making loans."

Local bankers say they are giving loans, but they are being more careful about it.

"Credit is tightening," said Mulligan, of Riverbank. "We're all nervous. Do we look at things more closely than we did before? Yes. We're all human."

But Grella said as bad as things are, they could be worse.

"The attitude is as if it's Armageddon," he said, "but the world ends only once, and I don't think this is the time it ends."