WASHINGTON – The dollar’s value is shaky, consumers are ridden with debt, interest rates are creeping up, more jobs are going overseas, the price of oil is high, health-care costs are rising, and the government is going deeper in debt.

All these negative forces are at work as President Bush prepares to begin his second term. In spite of them, economists say they see neither a boom nor a bust developing over the next four years, but rather a plain-vanilla, solid recovery in which the economy seems destined to muddle through again.

All bets are off if there is another major terrorist attack, and that possibility haunts consumers and financial markets. And there are other definite risks to the recovery, such as a possible sharp plunge in the dollar that could trigger a financial crisis and slow U.S. growth.

While economists don’t pretend they can accurately foresee events four years into the future, barring an attack or an unexpected crisis they see no reason the current recovery – showing an estimated annual growth rate of 3 percent to 3.5 percent – can’t continue for much of Bush’s second term.

President Bill Clinton had his boom in the 1990s, but if things go as economists now expect, Bush’s economy will encounter too many headwinds to blossom into the high-growth, low-inflation climate that Clinton had. In many ways, that is good, because the Clinton boom resulted in a “bubble” that burst.

Recession hit the United States when Bush took office, but it proved to be mild despite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In the past 12 months, the economy strengthened, but without the kind of strong job growth that has accompanied previous recoveries.

“There’s no exuberance,” said Joel Naroff, head of his own economic consulting firm in Holland, Pa., describing today’s economy. “Part of it is the issue of oil prices. Part of it is that we seem to have settled into a psychology that things will be OK, but just OK.”

Also, the economic stimuli that fired the economy in Bush’s first term have all dissipated. Unless there are new tax cuts or a big increase in federal spending, the economy will lack a new catalyst to move it into higher gear, economists said.

Further, the Federal Reserve is gradually raising rock-bottom interest rates, and the small increases are apt to continue through 2005. Some economists fear that interest rates could shoot even higher if inflation rises more sharply.

There is little doubt that the economy, particularly the job market, is going through a major restructuring in the wake of continued globalization. That restructuring will accelerate in a second Bush term and begin to pose economic and political problems, said Nigel Gault, economist at Global Insight, an international consulting firm.

Michael Drury, chief economist at Memphis-based McVean Trading & Investment LLC, said wages are rising by nearly 4 percent a year and that, in general, the standard of living is increasing. But he added: “The more-educated population is gaining a growing lion’s share of that wage growth compared with the less educated.”

China and India, with more science, engineering and finance graduates than the United States, are luring more American companies to their shores, and with them relatively high-paying jobs, Drury said. So while wages rise in the United States, he said, “the top is doing much better than the bottom, and the middle is starting to slip because of international competition.”

If the economy performs as many economists anticipate, U.S. companies will pick up the pace of hiring, although analysts don’t expect a dramatic decline in the unemployment rate, now at 5.5 percent.

Jared Bernstein, economist at the Economic Policy Institute, contends that the Bush administration lacks the “creativity and insight” to deal with job displacements caused by outsourcing. He favored building an aggressive “transitional safety net” for workers that would include training and funds to tide them over.

Bernstein said it’s still unclear whether a genuine jobs recovery is under way.

“We’ve had these head fakes before,” he said of recent sharp increases in business payrolls.

International concern is growing over a possible sharp decline in the dollar that might be caused chiefly by the fact that the United States this year will import $600 billion more than it exports.

Bernard Baumohl, an economist and former magazine reporter who has formed a consulting company, said he fears a currency crisis over the next three to 12 months. He said foreign investors, a key source of capital driving the American economy, appear to be less inclined to invest in the United States. Such a move could drive up interest rates in the United States and cause the price of imports to soar.

But other analysts said that they doubted that countries like China and Japan would pull away from U.S. investments and that any dollar decline would be orderly.

Gault said he saw no Bush boom because the consumer and housing sectors of the economy are stretched, and there is no new stimulus expected from Washington.

But even if consumers are saddled with more debt, Gault said he is not looking for the kind of consumer pullback that would throw the economy into recession. Household wealth, particularly a rise in home values, is giving consumers some confidence.

Americans should not be so apprehensive about the economy, Gault added.

“I think the U.S. economy has exhibited extreme resilience over the years,” he said, despite shocks such as terrorism, oil price increases, stock market plunges and distressing corporate scandals.

“We’re whining more than we ought to be about the economy,” said Davis Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s. “Unemployment is below its historical average. Inflation is low and so are interest rates, while productivity growth and income growth are still pretty strong. We got spoiled in the 1990s.”

If oil prices come down from a current level of more than $47 a barrel, Wyss said, “We think it will be an OK economy” over the next four years.

For the upcoming Christmas season, retail expert Kurt Barnard, president of a consulting firm in Upper Montclair, N.J., said signs point to a solid but not smashing holiday sales season.

Though consumers are spending nearly all their income and appear to be “tapped out,” Barnard said additional hiring would help to fuel more spending. Last month, companies added 337,000 payroll jobs, and economists say they would not be surprised if an average 200,000 jobs are created each month under today’s economy.

Few economists saw the budget deficit, at $413 billion this year, creating huge problems for the economy in the immediate future. But Naroff and Gault said the United States has limited time to deal with the deficit because the first Baby Boomers will reach early retirement age in 2008.