Not enough to send it into reverse, but enough to slow it down.

Laney said he expects 2008 to be roughly the same, speaking to 150 people at the 33rd annual First Hawaiian Bank Economic Outlook Forum Friday at the Maui Beach Hotel, The Maui News reported.

Laney has been presenting these reviews for 18 years, and prepares by spending a week on Maui interviewing business managers and inspecting the infrastructure. This year he was especially impressed by Kahului Harbor, which has the worst problems in a state full of problem harbors.

He noted that Maui's population has grown 32.6 percent in the last 15 years (about the same as Hawaii County, but the Big Island has two ports).

"Kahului Harbor is a modest, three-pier facility built years ago for a plantation economy, not for a tourism-dominated island that has grown so fast," he said.

Although Laney and University of Hawaii professor Jack Suyderhoud, who gave the international review, don't believe that the United States or Hawaii are about to go into recession, Laney said he thinks real growth in Hawaii could be just about zero next year.

That put him in mind of the last slowdown in Hawaii, in 1993. The economy contracted until 1997. Housing prices, to take one measure, dropped 16 percent then.

A resident who bought a residence in 1993 probably saw its value drop by thousands of dollars, but if he held on until today, he did all right. In fact, he'd have a paper gain of 150 percent, or 11.5 percent per year, compounded.

"That's a pretty hefty return on any asset," Laney said.

Since 1997, Maui housing values have advanced 200 percent.

While holders of real estate may be pleased, "That can't be good for any economy," Laney said.

"It erodes the the ability for all of us to make a living here."

Housing was also the big factor in a big jump in inflation last year that surprised all the state's economists, Laney included.

Inflation hit 6 percent and Laney believes it will run about 5 percent next year. Personal income, in dollars, is also expected to grow about 5 percent.

But real income is the gain in your pay packet minus inflation, which should mean just about no real gain in 2008, on average.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures consumer prices on Oahu but not on Maui, where prices are higher, so inflation might even have been higher than 6 percent here.

Laney noted that unemployment on Maui is a very low 2.1 percent, and he said the shortage of workers was mentioned "by everybody" as a brake on business expansion.

There are a number of numbers that suggest that Maui's economy is advancing but only painfully.

Maui Electric Co. power sales, a good proxy for activity, are up only 1.5 percent. Part of that growth is due to the drought, which requires more power for pumping water. That's not a result of economic expansion, Laney said.

First Hawaiian also tracks the credit card turnover of its 300 biggest merchant clients. Three years ago, this was growing at 16 percent. For the first half of 2007, it is less than 4 percent.

Laney and Suyderhoud both said they thought this year's concern about inflation has damped down. Suyderhoud expects the Federal Reserve to start lowering its discount interest rate at its next meeting, or perhaps the one after.

Otherwise, Suyderhoud said, international trends seem likely to continue much as they have. "We are still borrowing $2 billion a day" on the current account of trade with the rest of the world.

He said most economists still think China and Japan have undervalued their currencies compared with the dollar, which has been weakening.

Suyderhoud expects the U.S. economy to grow by 2.8 percent next year. But inflation, though "hard to gauge," will grow even more, so "that is not good enough to keep unemployment from rising."

There are no storm warnings out, however.

Suyderhoud, a professor of business economics at the Shidler School of Business at the University of Hawaii, called his report "boring." In economics, "a boring story has a good ending."

In local highlights, Laney, who is a professor of economics and finance at Hawaii Pacific University, pointed to a decline in tourist arrivals on Maui and also a decline in tourist spending.

Since tourist spending grew nearly 11 percent in 2006, total tourist outlay is still ahead of 2005.

He said a very noticeable trend is the explosion of time shares and condominiums.

"Nobody is building hotels any more," Laney said.

Two hotels, the Kapalua Bay and the Renaissance Wailea Beach, have been razed for conversion to smaller facilities. The Royal Lahaina is being partly rebuilt and converted, and there are new projects all over, of which time-share developments Marriott Ocean Club, Kaanapali Ocean Resort and Honua Kai are the biggest.

Housing prices, which Laney warned last year were softening, have softened. Median prices have gone down, although average prices are holding up – an indication that the highest priced houses are staying high and even going higher.

However, builders told him they have enough booked already to keep them busy for several years.

In answer to a question about the effect of subprime lending, Laney said no one really knows how much Hawaii was involved. He said First Hawaiian was not, but there is no way to measure how much business out-of-state lenders did here.

Since 2002, Maui's economy has been on a tear. That's changing.

"The Maui economic picture is somewhat more downbeat in 2007 and 2008 than in recent times," Laney said.

"However, remember that any economic cycle inevitably contains periods of cooling down. It's required for infrastructure to catch up and for slowly rising income to help bring affordability back."