Home prices may continue to drop as the share of distressed sales hovers at one-third or more of transactions, but an equilibrium that signals stability is in sight, he said. Nationally, home prices are down more than 30% since 2006.

"I don't think our problems are overwhelming ... they are manageable," Zandi said at the conference of the Mortgage Bankers Association, where more than 2,000 bankers have assembled to divine the future of their business.

"The key to home prices is the share of home sales that are distressed," Zandi said. "A year, year-and-a-half down the road that share will start coming down (and) you get price stability and then price growth."

However, whether Zandi should have the kind of outsized credibility he currently enjoys is a hotly debated topic right now in journalistic circles.

Business press critic Ryan Chittum recently chided financial reporters for relying too heavily on Zandi. To make his point, Chittum, writing on Sept. 9, noted that Zandi's name had already appeared 446 times in the business press this year alone.

That criticism drew a heated defense of Zandi from NPR's Adam Davidson on Planet Money.

He does one of the most widely followed economic forecasts. That forces him to be on top of the very latest news and data in a way that few others are. And what he says does, in fact, have a bigger impact than what most other economists say.

He's also great at explaining economic issues in a clear, straightforward but still intellectually grounded way. To put it mildly, this is not a trait that is easy to find among economists.

He's also at least a bit bipartisan. He advised the John McCain campaign and has recently defended President Obama. And he admits mistakes when he's wrong.

For all these reasons, I think Zandi is more likely than most to have substantive things to say on any given economic news.

He's not the only economist who meets all of these criteria, I'm sure, but I can't think of any others.

I would add to this that Zandi also appears to know how to play the media game more adeptly than many of his counterparts.

OK, I'm not saying Zandi isn't a special guy. Yet having hustled to meet daily deadlines for 20 years, I've come to find there are Zandis in just about every field out there. These are typically experts in a particular field who can speak plainly and who quickly call back reporters racing to meet a deadline. That doesn't mean the next day or later in the week, but within a few minutes or an hour or two at the most.

Sounds simple, but there are lots of very smart people out there who don't get it. If you want to get quoted, you need to make yourself available, and when you do, you actually need to say something instead of lapsing into jargon or acting like a deer in the headlights.

That said, it's a big world out there and I can't believe that Mark Zandi is the only one out there worth quoting on the fortunes of the housing market.

And treating him as some sort of a sage - a Nouriel Roubini for the bulls - would be a big mistake.

It would be nice to think the housing market will heal itself - how convenient. But we are at a critical moment here, with the growing realization that the housing market is not just a complete mess, but it is also a major obstacle to global economic recovery.

We need a national debate on this, not complacency.