When last we talked to Ken Matheny of Macroeconomic Advisers, he was predicting that the recession would end in the second quarter of 2009. Now, he has pushed the projected recovery back to the third quarter. He also thinks gross domestic product will fall 6 percent in the first quarter, a bigger drop than he was projecting a few weeks ago. He thinks the government will revise fourth-quarter GDP, originally reported at -3.8%, down to -5.3%. And he says unemployment will peak at close to 9 percent, up from his earlier forecast of 8.5 percent.

Those gloomy numbers aside, Matheny claims to be an optimist about the economic situation. In a speech today at a St. Louis University economic-forecasting conference, presented a list of economic signs of spring which we haven’t seen yet, but which he hopes to see sometime this year. They include a reduction in the inventory of unsold houses, and a slower rate of decline in home prices. Here’s Matheny on the housing market:

I think the rate of decline will moderate, hopefully, before the end of the year. It’s not that we have to get back to the go-go days of a few years ago; we just have to stem the deterioration.