Time to dust off those Ouija boards and take out the tea leaves. The way things are going nowadays you too have about as much a chance of correctly predicting whether the nation and the state of California are either headed towards, or are already in, a recession as any of the professionals who do it for a living. It’s a 50-50 crapshoot no matter which way you lean on the issue.

Late last week Nobel prize winning economist Robert Engle told attendees of a business seminar at the University of Albany that the U.S. economy is headed for a recession. “But I don’t think it’s going to be a really serious recession,” he said, according to published reports in The Business Review (Albany).

This week, by contrast, the San Diego Union-Tribune is reporting that prognosticators working at UCLA’s Anderson Forecast don’t see the nation — or the state — falling into a recession. “Don’t worry, be happy,” said Edward Leamer, director of the forecast, according to the publication.

Although he believes the $152 million economic stimulus package President Bush and Congress approved last month will help somewhat, Engle, a professor at New York University,  is disappointed in the performance of the housing sector enough to blame it as the chief reason that a recession is likely.

“What I’m hoping is that this sector of the economy doesn’t get legislated away. I think subprime loans have made it possible for a lot of low-income households to buy a home for the first time. I think it’s unfortunate it has turned into a crisis for the financial sector,” Engle said.

To Leamer and his group at UCLA, what we have is a sluggish economy, and a recession is not in the cards because the current state of the economy does not match those of previous recessions when factories were laying off large numbers of employees. In defending the UCLA forecast, Leamer justified his positive outlook by reasoning that consumer spending should keep the economy afloat.

He may be correct — at least as to California — based on the latest California Consumer Confidence survey conducted by economists at the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.

According to the Chapman Composite Index of Consumer Sentiment, while responses to the survey were negative when it came to the current and future economic conditions (to the lowest level seen since the survey began in Q3 2002), consumers did answer positively to their future spending plans for big ticket items (although the uptick was only 5 points for Q1 2008 after a 16-point decline for Q4 2007).

Still, whether or not any particular state — or the nation as a whole — is actually in recession may be beside the point. The real question may be, how do consumers feel about it? And how are their pocketbooks feeling these days with higher fuel prices and higher food prices, on top of concerns about whether they can continue to afford to stay in their home and whether they will have a job to go to tomorrow.

How are your tea leaves looking now? Is the Ouija board giving you the answers you’re looking for yet?

No matter the immediate decision on economic issues, one factor is certain — the nation’s housing market (in most areas) is stagnant at best with no clear turnaround point in sight. So until this mess flushes through the system, foreclosures are going to continue to offer opportunities for investors and homebuyers with the patience to wait for the right deal to present itself.