IN BRIEF

MGM Mirage board to stay neutral on deal

MGM Mirage, the casino company majority owned by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, said its board has no recommendation on whether shareholders should participate in Dubai's tender offer for as many as 14.2 million shares.

The offer, worth $84 a share, is part of Dubai World's planned investment of as much as $5.1 billion in the Las Vegas- based casino company. The board will remain neutral, MGM said in a statement

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo.

Economist warns U.S. facing recession threat

Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein said the U.S. housing slump threatens a broader recession, and the Federal Reserve should lower interest rates. "The economy could suffer a very serious downturn," Feldstein, head of the group that charts America's business cycles, told a Fed conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Saturday. "A sharp reduction in the interest rate, in addition to a igorous lender-of-last-resort policy, would attenuate that very bad outcome."

Feldstein made a case for lowering the overnight lending rate between banks to 4.25 percent from 5.25 percent to cushion the economy from the fallout of defaults on subprime mortgages.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told the same gathering last week that the Fed will do what's needed to stop the past month's credit- market rout from ending the six-year expansion.

SACRAMENTO, Calif.

Housing slump hurting California job market

The deepening housing slump is hurting California's job market and threatens to jeopardize the economic progress workers have seen over the last few years, according to a new report released Sunday.

The fallout from the mortgage crisis comes on the heels of Census Bureau data that showed California's median income rose to $55,318 in 2006, up $1,866 from the previous year and about 2.8 percent from 2001 when adjusted for inflation, the California Budget Project reported in a survey timed to coincide with the Labor Day holiday.

The report -- "Labor Day 2007: California's Workers Face a Mix of Promising and Troubling Trends" -- also found fewer Californians living below the federal poverty line: 12.2 percent in 2006, compared with 13.2 percent the previous year.

But industries tied to the housing market -- a major driver of California's job growth over the last few years -- "have lost jobs during the past year and recent developments suggest that the decline has yet to bottom out," the study found.