CERNOBBIO, Italy – Is the global economy out of the woods? Two years after near-meltdown, with the U.S. looking sluggish, equity markets groggy and Europeans fighting a debt crisis, experts gathered in Italy offered a generally gloomy outlook – especially for the United States and much of the industrialized world.

The doomsayers were led by New York University economist Nouriel Roubini, who warned in booming tones that “there is a significant risk of a double-dip recession in the United States” as well as in Japan and many European countries.

Some of the assembled experts and leaders at the annual Ambrosetti Forum on the shores of Lake Como were somewhat more upbeat: economist Edwin Truman, a senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, predicted that “the most likely global outlook is subpar growth.”

But most appeared to agree on a sobering array of basic problems standing in the way of true recovery including:

•Many of the growth drivers in place since the collapse of Lehman Brothers are winding up or have ended. These include not only the massive stimulus spending but tax breaks, programs such as Cash for Clunkers and – for some countries like Russia – high commodity prices.

•The stimulus deemed necessary to jump-start moribund economies soon causes deficits and debt, upsetting the markets enough to spur austerity – which undermines growth.

•Europe continues to lose competitiveness partly because of the euro, which – for all the fretting over its dip earlier this year at the height of the Greek debt crisis – remains high when measured against the U.S. dollar.

•The sector that is widely seen as the spark of the global recession – U.S. real estate – has not recovered.

•The jobs picture is not improving and in parts of the developed world – such as Spain, with 20 percent unemployment – it is disastrous.

America’s jobless rate climbed to 9.6 percent from 9.5 percent in July – a figure above the rate in Britain and Germany.

“I see a very weak labor market,” said Roubini, who gained celebrity for predicting the global collapse of 2008 when others were still celebrating the boom times. He noted unemployment is close to 10 percent and almost 17 percent when including discouraged workers or partially employed ones.

He puts the chance of recession at 40 percent or more – a position he has staked in recent weeks – and said even weak growth would still feel like a recession.

“The U.S. has to create 150,000 every month in the private sector just to stabilize the rate and prevent it from rising,” he said. “We’d have to create 300,000 jobs every month for the next three years just to bring back the level of employment to before this recession started,” Roubini said.

“Nobody … believes the U.S. is going to create any amount of jobs like that,” he said.