Housing investors and home sellers take note: Harvard economist Ken Rogoff says the housing sector will take another five years to recover.

“Right now, the worst-case scenario has been taken off the table,” Rogoff told CNBC.

"The broader risks from the downturn are to the dollar and interest rates, and to the U.S. government itself because it’s taken a lot of debt on to its books."

"There's more and more debt and if interest rates go up, we're going to feel it,” Rogoff notes.

“It's hard to see how we'll have booming growth for the next five years."

Rogoff sees a W-shaped recovery, with the economy going up and then down again for a while.

He thinks the stimulus package will create a bounce in the second half of the year, but says the “longer run trend is very slow, so we’re very vulnerable to dipping down again sometime in the next couple of years, like Japan.”

John Osbon, managing partner at Osbon Capital Management, says that an L-shaped recovery is the worst-case scenario, meaning too much debt and not enough equity.

"There was a W back in the recession of 1933 to 1937,” Osbon told Forbes. “We're more like the W because of our spending.”

“Some people think we can't sustain the growth though to complete the W."