The Financial Times reports that Gordon Brown on Sunday warned Britain’s economy faces a “dangerous” year ahead as he battled against rising energy prices and higher pay awards that he fears could undermine his pledge to “break the back of inflation”.

Although he insisted Britain’s economy was strong, the prime minister saw dark clouds gathering across the Atlantic, including last week’s sharp rise in unemployment that raised fears of a serious US downturn.

The risks are highlighted on Monday by Lawrence Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, who calls in his Financial Times column for a fiscal stimulus of up to $75bn (€51bn) to offset the risk of recession.

Surveying the US economy, the fall-out of the credit crunch and global inflationary pressures, Mr Brown told the Observer, the British Sunday newspaper: “This is a difficult and dangerous situation for the world economy.”

But he remains confident the British economy will dip only slightly this year before recovering in 2009, a view founded on a belief that inflation has been largely tamed, allowing the Bank of England to cut interest rates. But the situation remains fragile, a fact implicitly recognised on Sunday by Alistair Darling, chancellor, who personally intervened to question why energy companies were imposing double-digit price rises.

Mr Brown also admitted more needed to be done to “break the back of inflation”, starting with a continued insistence on below-inflation pay rises for public sector workers, in spite of an independent review recommending more.

The prime minister said MPs and other senior public officials would be expected to join the police, nurses and others in showing pay restraint.

He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr: “Government ministers must have a rate of pay increase that is below 2 per cent: 1.9 per cent. At the same time, my recommendation is that that is what goes for MPs.”

Although MPs vote on their own pay and many will be furious at being told to reject a proposed 10 per cent rise over three years – recommended by an independent review body – they know they will be fiercely criticised if they do not show restraint.

Both Mr Brown and Mr Darling have used New Year interviews to highlight the perils facing the British economy, insisting the underlying conditions are sound and that they are taking “tough decisions” for the long term.

The political calculation is clear: they hope to take the credit for an upturn in 2009 in the run-up to the next election. But they also know there is a risk of sounding too gloomy about 2008 and talking the country into a slump.

The last thing Mr Brown or Mr Darling want is for consumers to take fright and to start tightening their belts excessively and both have refused to urge households to change their behaviour.

Mr Brown on Sunday said he was taking decisions for “the long haul” – seen by some as a hint at an election in 2010.

The FT says in a report from Germany to forget rising juvenile crime, globalisation or climate change. According to a recent poll, it is rocketing electricity prices that are topping Germans' list of concerns for 2008.

Germany was a pioneer when it opened its power market 10 years ago. But unlike in the telecommunications sector, liberalisation has not brought cheaper electricity. Indeed, prices have risen so steeply that some economists are beginning to consider the opening a textbook example of botched liberalisation, and one that could put Germans off privatisation for years.

"The liberalisation has failed," says Claudia Kemfert, an energy economist and adviser to the European Commission. "Too many mistakes have been made in the past 10 years that cannot be reversed."

Businesses are now paying 65 per cent more for their power than 10 years ago while household bills have inflated by 50 per cent since 2000. Prices are the third highest among the EU's 27 member states.

With electricity accounting for 90 per cent of industry's energy costs, the economic impact is large. A study found that growth in 2006 would have been almost half a point higher had power been a third cheaper. Jürgen Thumann, chairman of the BDI industry federation, has warned that -Germany's industry-rich economy can no longer afford Europe's most expensive energy.

For households, fast-rising power prices this year could damp consumption. A survey by the Forsa polling group this week showed 73 per cent of Germans plan to cut their energy consumption - the top item on their savings list.

Power producers refuse to take the blame. Without the doubling of energy taxes since 2000, they argue, electricity would cost the same today as in 1998. "Taxes and levies now account for 41 per cent of the price," says Roger Kohlmann, deputy director of the BdEW power-sector federation.

A ban on new nuclear power stations, he says, is forcing producers to rely on expensive oil and gas. Not to mention their investments in renewable energy, which must also be recouped.

Critics of the sector also blame the state - for different reasons. Prof Kemfert says the government's mistake was to open the market without creating a regulator. Only in 2006, under pressure from Brussels, did the "grand coalition" of Angela Merkel, chancellor, set up a Federal Network Agency to enforce nondiscriminatory access to the power grid.

The government, Prof Kemfert says, then failed to put pressure on the biggest participants to invest in new power stations and networks, thus keeping power scarce.

"I would not say privatisation has failed," says Hubertus Bardt from the IdW economic institute. "But the delay in creating a regulator has cost the producers a lot of trust among the public."

Beyond power, economists are concerned that this distrust could embolden the anti-liberalisation camp by suggesting privatisation's benefits - better service, lower prices - do not apply to all activities.

Liberalisation fatigue is already tangible in the government. The flotation of the Deutsche Bahn railway operator has suffered delays and a minimum wage for postal services introduced last month will shield Deutsche Post from competition after the letters market opened this month.

Things might be improving, however. A recent law will help the Federal Cartel Office watchdog obtain information about power prices and detect manipulations. Last week it said it would create a dedicated working group. "We now have much better tools to look into the composition of these prices," said a spokeswoman.

Consumers too are beginning to act. In 2006, 680,000 changed suppliers and the Cartel Office believes more than 1m did so last year.

For Prof Kemfert, however, this is too little too late. "What we need is a European power market, with a European regulator and a European exchange," she says. "The opportunity offered by the liberalisation of the German market has long been lost."

The New York Times reports that people attending the Consumer Electronics Show, starting here on Monday, will encounter a crowded and noisy stage where technology companies from around the world unveil their latest wares.

They may well not see any of the big consumer electronics hits of 2008.

The convention, one of high-tech’s most important annual gatherings, has never been bigger. Roughly 140,000 attendees will trudge through 1.85 million square feet of exhibition space.

But despite its size, or perhaps because of it, the annual conference has become a challenging and sometimes ineffectual place to introduce new products.

The show, which started in 1967, was once a springboard for the industry’s biggest successes, like the VCR in 1970, the compact disc player in 1981 and the DVD in 1996.

Now, electronics makers and industry analysts say the show has become so loud, sprawling and preoccupied with technical esoterica that for many companies, it is as much a place to get lost as to get discovered.

Part of the problem is that technology has wormed its way into so many products over the years — from toys to kitchen appliances — that it is hard to say exactly what an electronics trade show should be about.

“Everything has morphed into it,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch, who is skipping the show after attending for four years. “You’ve got a 150-inch plasma screen and next to it some guy selling electronic toothbrushes.”

Technology companies now frequently introduce their products elsewhere, in an effort to reach consumers more directly. The Apple iPhone, the Nintendo Wii and other recent must-haves were not unveiled at C.E.S. One of the industry’s biggest hits in 2007 was the Flip Video camcorder, an easy-to-use pocket-size device that sells for $120.

Executives from Pure Digital Technologies, its maker, visited Las Vegas last year during the show but kept to their hotel suite at the Wynn, quietly briefing retailers on the device. The company introduced the camera in June with a television ad campaign, and stellar word of mouth landed it in the hands of an enthusiastic Oprah Winfrey on her show in October.

“Especially in the camcorder space, C.E.S. is about one-upping the competition with features — ‘My hard drive is bigger than yours,’” said Jonathan Kaplan, Pure Digital’s chief executive. “We would get lost in the noise at C.E.S. trying to talk to a consumer that is probably not even listening.”

Various colors and models of the Flip Video were the five best-selling camcorders on Amazon.com during December.

The show is still unmatched in its sheer number of product introductions, which collectively represent billions of dollars in annual sales. Major vendors from around the world will show off high-definition television sets, novel entertainment set-top boxes for living rooms, robots, electronic toys and an array of new Internet services. Some of those products may manage to rise above the noise and become a breakthrough consumer hit.

Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, which runs the show, said sales of recent hit products pale in comparison to the revenue from broad categories like high-definition televisions, which are a big part of the C.E.S. scene.

But many of the products introduced here, rather than representing quantum leaps, are incremental enhancements or important technical changes that may not register immediately with consumers.

That incremental approach is perhaps one reason that news from last year’s electronics show was definitively drowned out by a much smaller gathering: Macworld in San Francisco, where Apple introduced the iPhone.

“One of the reasons Apple stole C.E.S. last year was that its message was simple and succinct,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. “C.E.S. does not have a crystal-clear message. There’s too much information, and it looks like you have to get a Ph.D. to get these things to work.”

Microsoft, one of the largest companies attending the show, has used Bill Gates’s introductory keynote at the show to make major product introductions, like the Xbox game console in 2001.

More recently, Microsoft’s biggest unveilings have not come at the show. The company introduced the Zune music player in the fall of 2006 and upgraded it last November to get the product in front of shoppers during the holiday season. It introduced Surface, a touch-screen tabletop computer, in June at another industry conference.

Microsoft says that in his keynote this year, Mr. Gates will discuss some new partnerships, including one with NBC to distribute coverage of the Olympics, and some new features in Ford Sync, a system that integrates cellphones, navigation and voice commands into automobile dashboards. Mr. Gates first talked about that product during his keynote at last year’s C.E.S.

Todd Thibodeaux, senior vice president for industry relations at the Consumer Electronics Association, said the big issues at this year’s show would revolve around the marriage of hardware and content. Consumer electronics makers, he said, will unveil and pursue partnerships with cable, satellite and phone providers, as well as media companies.

“It’s the biggest comparison-shopping floor in the world of consumer electronics,” Mr. Thibodeaux said. “In terms of major innovations, there are more than ever.”

But will the show produce a big hit product?

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s related to WiMax,” a new wide-scale wireless technology, Mr. Thibodeaux said. He added: “It could be the Sony Rolly robot. It’s a small media player that rolls around like a robot.”

The NYT says that August 2003, Harry B. Macklowe raced from lender to lender to round up a record-breaking $1.4 billion to buy the General Motors Building, the 50-story commercial skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan that is one of New York’s trophy properties.

Then 66, he gambled mightily to outmaneuver rival bidders and to vault back into the top ranks of New York developers. He went so far as to put down a nonrefundable $50 million deposit and sell many of his residential buildings to raise cash. Some bankers and real estate executives scoffed at the deal, privately suggesting that Mr. Macklowe had overpaid and would drown in an undertow of debt.

Not for the first time, Mr. Macklowe, an acknowledged master of winner-take-all real estate poker, proved his skeptics wrong. He expanded and enhanced the valuable retail space of the G.M. Building — on Fifth Avenue at 59th Street — by creating a glass cube for an Apple store that has become a popular tourist destination. As the market soared, Macklowe Properties refinanced the tower twice, most recently in a deal that values it at about $2.7 billion.

But these days Mr. Macklowe is scrambling for financing yet again. He has a $6.4 billion debt payment coming due next month in connection with his purchase of seven other Midtown Manhattan office buildings a year ago. When he bought those buildings from Equity Office Properties, he more than doubled the size of his real estate portfolio and used only $50 million of his own money to do so; he borrowed $7 billion to finance the rest of the purchase.

As often happens in real estate, a once-frothy national cycle is losing steam and the market has turned against many buyers. Mr. Macklowe, with his empire of 15 prime office towers and two development sites in one of the world’s best business districts, is awash in expensive, short-term debt at the very moment that financial backing for megadeals has all but shut down. One of his loans is backed by a $1 billion personal guarantee, and he is already in default on $510 million in development loans for a Park Avenue project.

Mr. Macklowe’s predicament marks the denouement of an unprecedented four-year period in which developers threw gobs of money at real estate as prices for office towers, especially in Manhattan, doubled and tripled almost as fast as sales could be recorded. Investment banks avidly underwrote the binge, often basing loans not on existing rents but on projections of rental income well into the future.

All of this worked swimmingly so long as the economy hummed along and banks could pool the loans and sell them to investors. Now, the economy is showing signs of stress, and Wall Street’s repackaging machine is sputtering.

“In hindsight, everybody should have been more cautious,” said Robert Bach, the chief economist at Grubb & Ellis, the national real estate brokerage firm. “We all knew this wasn’t going to last, but we hoped it would end with a whimper, not a bang.”

Analysts, bankers and developers are not predicting the imminent collapse of the commercial real estate market, a reprise of the early 1990s, when property values dropped by half, vacancies soared and banks were crushed under the weight of soured real estate loans. But developers who jumped in at the top of this market are likely to feel some pain because purchases were built on the assumption that rents would keep escalating and that the value of buildings would keep appreciating.

With building owners no longer able to refinance their properties and pull out cash, Mr. Macklowe and his son, William S. Macklowe, have only a month to repay $7 billion, work out a new deal with their bankers or risk the breakup of their empire. There is widespread speculation in the real estate industry that the Macklowes may be forced to unload some of their properties at a discount to creditors — including a sizable stake in the G.M. Building. At worst, they could be forced to shed much of their portfolio.

“This is very high-stakes poker,” said Scott A. Singer, the executive vice president of the Singer & Bassuk Organization, a real estate finance and brokerage company in New York. “To owe more than $5 billion in this environment is tremendously risky. There are a very, very limited number of lenders who can make multibillion-dollar loans now.”

For his part, Mr. Macklowe — a fierce competitor who still races his custom 112-foot yacht in regattas off the coast of Sardinia — coolly plays down the crisis. He went sailing in the Caribbean three days before Christmas while his son stayed home negotiating with the family’s bankers.

“Our lenders have supported us in the past to an extraordinary degree,” Mr. Macklowe said in an interview in his stark white offices on the 21st floor of the G.M. Building, the evening before he flew south. “We’re pretty confident that, going forward, we’ll be able to achieve accommodations and extensions from our group of lenders.”

THE Macklowes aren’t the only real estate barons in a tight spot. The Kushner Companies, also family owned, plunged into the Manhattan real estate market in 2006, paying $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue, at 53rd Street. The cash flow from 666 Fifth represents only about two-thirds of the amount needed to service the debt on the building — a shortfall of about $5 million a month — according to Real Capital Analytics, a research company in New York.

In Los Angeles, the developer Robert F. Maguire III may be forced to sell his publicly traded company, Maguire Properties, after buying a portfolio of buildings from the Blackstone Group just before the subprime credit crisis sent many of his tenants into bankruptcy. An Australian company, the Centro Properties Group, is putting itself up for sale after failing to refinance billions of dollars of short-term debt stemming in part from its acquisition of an American shopping center company.

To be sure, some bright spots remain. Though vacancy rates are up nationally, the Manhattan market remains healthy, with the vacancy rate in Midtown, the most desirable business district, just 5.5 percent. Because relatively little new space is coming on line in Manhattan in the next few years, the New York market appears to be relatively solid.

But fewer deals are being made and rent increases have slowed, if not stopped. If financial institutions continue cutting payrolls, much vacant space could come back on the market and drag down rents, even in Manhattan.

Despite the problems hanging over Mr. Macklowe’s holdings, some analysts say that it would be a mistake to count him out. This is the third time Mr. Macklowe has stumbled since he started in the real estate business about 48 years ago, and each time he has come roaring back. He has a knack for enhancing the look and cash flow of his buildings, and he is regarded as a shrewd, brass-knuckled negotiator in a rough-and-tumble industry.

A senior member at a major real estate investment firm, who described Mr. Macklowe as a friend and asked not to be identified so as not to jeopardize their relationship, said the developer has “assets with enough value to pay off his bridge loans.” But, this person asked, can Mr. Macklowe “do it with everybody smelling blood in the water and looking to buy a bargain?”

Some of the wiliest players in the real estate business have already been circling Mr. Macklowe.

This past fall, Vornado Realty Trust, of which Steven Roth is chairman, bought a stake in loans collateralized by four of Mr. Macklowe’s buildings on an apparent bet it might snare some great real estate on the cheap, bankers and real estate executives said.

For the last month, Stephen M. Ross, the chairman of the real estate company Related, has been talking to Mr. Macklowe about a deal for Macklowe Properties’ coveted Drake Hotel site, at Park Avenue and 56th Street, an executive involved in the talks said. Real estate executives say another rival developer, Sheldon H. Solow, may buy some of Mr. Macklowe’s debt in a bid to gain control of the G.M. Building, although a spokesman for Mr. Solow said Mr. Solow was not trying to acquire any of the debt.

THE Macklowes readily acknowledge that they are looking for equity partners. Mr. Macklowe’s son, William, emphasizes the quality of the buildings in his family’s Manhattan portfolio, which includes 2 Grand Central Tower, Park Avenue Tower and Worldwide Plaza. He points out that the buildings are also largely full.

“It’s not a real estate crisis but a capital markets crisis,” the younger Mr. Macklowe said. “Our legacy and acquired portfolios are renting at market rates or better. In August, when the world took a 180-degree turn, we and others got caught up in it.”

As it now stands, the Macklowes say they owe Deutsche Bank a $5.2 billion payment in February, in connection with the Equity Office transaction. They owe the Fortress Investment Group, a leading private equity and hedge fund firm, $1.2 billion for a bridge loan backed by a limited partnership interest in the G.M. Building, stakes in 11 other Macklowe buildings and a personal guarantee from the Macklowes for $1 billion.

The Macklowes are in default on a $510 million loan connected with a project planned for the Drake site. Although the Macklowes have a nonbinding agreement with an anchor tenant, a Nordstrom department store, they have not acquired all the land for the project. A spokesman for Nordstrom said the company was also talking to other developers.

At the same time, the family is trying to obtain a new construction loan for a 30-story office building being built at 510 Madison Avenue, at 53rd Street.

Even during this tense period, Mr. Macklowe often interrupts an interview with jokes. And those who know him say that he can be both endearing and notoriously tough. He has tangled with lenders, regulators, city officials, tenants and even his former East Hampton neighbor, Martha Stewart.

“Dealing with Harry can be a charming experience, and it can be like a trip to the dentist without anesthesia,” said Peter Hauspurg, chairman of the real estate investment services firm Eastern Consolidated. “At the end of the day, Harry’s operative phrase is: It’s just business.”

DESPITE Mr. Macklowe’s hard-edged business reputation, friends say he also devotes considerable time to his grandchildren, his collection of modern art, golf at the Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton and, of course, sailing.

The son of a Westchester County garment executive, Mr. Macklowe was a college dropout when he started as a low-level real estate broker in 1960. Three years later, he and his supervisor formed their own company, Wolf & Macklowe. By the 1980s, he was building a succession of towers, including the angular black-glass Metropolitan Tower, on 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues; 2 Grand Central Tower; and the residential building RiverTower, on the East Side, where he and his wife, Linda, have a duplex.

Mr. Macklowe would like to be known for his building designs, or his art collection. But what many New Yorkers recall is that in 1985, Mr. Macklowe’s company was involved in the illegal, nocturnal demolition of two single-room-occupancy hotels near Times Square, only hours before a law went into effect protecting the buildings. He was not indicted in the incident, but one of his executives pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment. Five years later, he opened the Hotel Macklowe on the site.

As his purchase of the G.M. Building demonstrated, Mr. Macklowe often gets the timing right. On the day the stock market crashed in October 1987, he sold a package of 15 buildings to Joseph Neumann for $350 million, or $120 million more than Mr. Macklowe and his partners paid for them 10 months earlier. Mr. Neumann’s empire subsequently collapsed.

Like many other developers in the early 1990s, Mr. Macklowe took a beating during a severe real estate recession, ultimately returning both the Riverbank West tower on 42nd Street and the Hotel Macklowe, now known as the Millennium Broadway Hotel, to the lenders.

Rather than disappear, Mr. Macklowe did a series of smaller projects in the mid- to late 1990s, building less-glamorous apartment houses or renovating office buildings on Madison Avenue. In 2003, he bought the G.M. Building, a move that left many of his peers describing him as a real estate genius. The building was built for General Motors in 1968 and now houses tenants like hedge funds, the investor Carl C. Icahn and the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. Mr. Macklowe suggests that the building is worth $3.5 billion or even $4 billion, though it may be hard to find a lender or investor who agrees.

By the fall of 2006, Mr. Macklowe was sitting pretty, primarily because the value of the G.M. Building had jumped so handsomely. He was putting together a premier development centered on what was once the site of the Drake Hotel, which he bought in 2006 for $418.3 million. He and his son were also building a hotel and apartment house at Madison and 53rd Street. After the residential market appeared to slow, they nimbly converted it into an office building for hedge funds, complete with a swimming pool and a luxurious health club.

Earlier this year, Mr. Macklowe decided to try his luck again. After the Blackstone Group, a private equity powerhouse, beat back Vornado to take over Equity Office with a $39 billion bid, Blackstone quickly decided to sell most of Equity Office’s Midtown Manhattan buildings without taking possession of all of them. During 10 days of whirlwind deal-making, Mr. Macklowe secured financing and stepped in to buy seven of the buildings for $7 billion.

The timing looked propitious. Credit was so readily available that Mr. Macklowe needed to put down only $50 million. He borrowed the rest in short-term loans from Deutsche Bank and Fortress. But that left him in the dicey position of having to find new sources of permanent financing or equity to pay off the short-term debt.

“He went from utter comfort to being on the precipice again,” said one real estate executive who has worked with Mr. Macklowe and asked not to be identified to retain a relationship with the developer.

The annual rent for the seven Midtown buildings was generally $55 to $59 a square foot, according to William Macklowe, but Deutsche Bank and Fortress underwrote the deal on the assumption that rents would soon rise to $100 a square foot.

After all, the commercial real estate market was higher than ever. The vacancy rate had fallen to record lows, while high construction costs made new buildings prohibitive. Landlords at prime office buildings were getting more than $100 a square foot annually, while the average rents for first-class Midtown buildings rose to $73.31 by the first quarter of 2007 from $55.21 in the first quarter of 2005, according to Reis Inc., a New York office research company.

At the same time, average prices for large office buildings in Midtown more than doubled, to $745 a square foot from $357, according to Real Capital Analytics. Investment banks and foreign companies began pouring capital into real estate. Lenders, in turn, took more risks, often providing financing for 90 to even 100 percent of a building’s price. Investors became ever more willing to accept a lower initial rate of return, known as the capitalization rate.

As with the residential market, the money flowed easily because lenders did not keep these risky loans on their balance sheets — as the commercial banks and savings-and-loan associations did to their peril in the early 1990s. Instead, Wall Street repackaged hundreds of billions of dollars of loans as commercial-mortgage-backed securities and sold them to investors.

“Loans with more aggressive terms that weren’t available in ’03 and ’04 became the norm in ’06, when suddenly lenders became very accommodating,” said Mike Kirby, a principal of Green Street Advisors, a research company in Newport Beach, Calif., that specializes in real estate investment trusts. “The attitude was, ‘Gee, we’re not going to own this stuff; we get terrific fees for underwriting these loans, and we can blow it out in a C.M.B.S. deal in three months.’”

EARLIER this year, however, the real estate winds shifted. In April, just two months after Mr. Macklowe bought the Equity Office properties, Moody’s Investors Services, the bond rating agency, said it planned to readjust how it rated commercial-mortgage-backed bonds to better reflect their risk. The agency complained that lenders were making overly optimistic projections about rent growth.

By last summer, as the subprime mortgage crisis hit residential lending and credit markets tightened, opportunities evaporated for developers like Mr. Macklowe to refinance expensive short-term debt.

Perhaps slow to realize the severity of the credit problem, Mr. Macklowe paid nearly $60 million in June for virtually the entire seventh floor of the Plaza Hotel, the Manhattan landmark that has been converted into condominiums. He hired the architect Charles Gwathmey to design a 13,000-square-foot apartment, which offers a view across Fifth Avenue to the G.M. Building.

But in September, the Macklowes hired the investment banking guru Joseph R. Perella to help them find new equity partners. They flew to the Middle East to visit what cash-starved developers call “the Big Four” — Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai — in an unsuccessful hunt for fresh capital.

“We knew we could get higher value” for the Equity Office buildings, “but it wasn’t going to come in years two, three or four,” William Macklowe says. “We had a plan for a permanent capital solution. The events of the late summer slowed that down.”

The Macklowes say they also spent more than $150 million paying off short-term lenders at the Drake Hotel site and received an extension on their senior debt, which has since expired. But the Macklowes still have to contend with a $510 million note backed by the site.

“There are people out there who are very eager to acquire it if Macklowe decides not to build, or something untoward happens,” Harry Macklowe said. “We’re talking to several of our peers who’ve asked to join us in that development. We’re evaluating.”

There is increasing pressure, meanwhile, to persuade Deutsche Bank and Fortress to extend their deadline beyond Feb. 8 for at least $6.4 billion in debt, allowing the Macklowes more time to find new equity partners.

Bankers and real estate executives are divided over whether the Macklowes will be forced to sell some properties — maybe even some of the most valuable assets. Some also argue that layoffs in the financial industry this year will almost certainly depress the market and the value of commercial property.

Others, like Scott Latham, a broker at Cushman & Wakefield, contend that the vacancy rate is so low that it would take tens of thousands of layoffs to turn Midtown into a tenants’ market. Rents will not go up as fast as they have in the past 12 months, he said, but almost no one is predicting that rents will fall.

Mr. Macklowe “may shed some assets, just because it allows him to control whatever he holds onto,” Mr. Latham said. But there are still enough foreign investors interested in the Manhattan market, he said, “that Mr. Macklowe may not have to sell his core properties.”

A friend of Mr. Macklowe, who asked not to be identified to preserve a business relationship with him, put it another way. “Somehow he always manages to pull it off,” the friend said. “But he won’t do anything until the bitter end. He will play it out all the way.”