Even after passage of the Bush administration's 700-billion-dollar financial rescue plan Friday, the United States' economic options span the unappealing gamut from bad to worse, a newspaper report said yesterday.

Even if the financial bailout works, the economy faces troubles too pervasive and entrenched to be solved any time soon, the Los Angeles Times said.

"While Americans have spent the last month transfixed by the spectacle of one financial giant after another crashing to the ground, the rest of the U.S. economy has been sinking in the muck," the paper noted.

"The wheels seem to be coming off the economy right now," Brian P. Sack, vice president of the respected forecasting firm of Macroeconomic Advisers, was quoted as saying. "It's hard to see how we avoid a recession, and it could prove a tough one to climb out of."

Even if the financial bailout plan begins to work, the nation will be lucky if all it experiences is a bad slowdown, said the paper.

The alternative, economists say, is something much worse -- a contraction that might go on for years.

The paper listed the following signs that bode ill for the economy:

-- The government reported that American employers sliced September payrolls by 159,000 jobs, the ninth straight month of losses and one that puts the country on track to shed a million jobs this year;

-- Consumers, who account for more than two-thirds of the nation's total economic activity and who boosted their spending earlier in the year thanks in part to more than 100-billion-dollarin government stimulus checks, have reversed course and begun cutting expenditures, prompting real consumption, after adjustment for inflation, to slip two-tenths of a point in June, a half-point in July and flat-lined in August;

-- Manufacturers, many of whom had managed to profit because the weak U.S. dollar helped boost exports, have seen their business begin to dry up in recent months, with new factory orders unexpectedly dropping 4 percent in August, the biggest decline in two years and capital goods orders, an indicator of companies' future investment plans, slipping 2.4 percent, the biggest drop in more than a year and a half; and

-- Governments, especially state governments, have begun making steep cuts, with 29 of the 50 states having already cut spending, raising taxes or tapping emergency funds to balance their budgets for the fiscal year that began July 1.

The combination of consumers hunkering down, manufacturers losing orders and states making cuts has economists slashing their growth forecasts for the coming months and years, the paper said.