LOS ANGELES — Soaring foreclosure filings and sagging expectations of future home sales among developers raised prospects yesterday that the worst housing slump in 16 years could drag on into next year.

Chief executives of some of the nation's largest housing and mortgage lending companies echoed the gloomy national picture while detailing steps being taken to cope with the problems.

Countrywide Financial Corp.'s chairman and chief executive, Angelo Mozilo, delivered a bullish outlook on his company's future but called on the government to do more to ease the credit crunch and help borrowers in distress avoid foreclosure.

"It is imperative that liquidity return to the mortgage market and that the tide be turned in order to stabilize home prices," he said during an investors' conference in San Francisco.

"A failure to do so will not only imperil the financial lives of hardworking American families but will inevitably impact our broader economy," he said.

The Federal Reserve yesterday provided some help by lowering its federal funds rate a half-point to 4.75 percent — the first cut in more than four years.

The move means borrowers who can obtain credit should see rates drop on a variety of loans. It will become less expensive for people to finance certain credit-card debt and for homeowners to take out popular home equity lines of credit.

And it will provide relief to some homeowners whose adjustable-rate mortgages reset in the fall. Those rates will still go up but not by as much as they otherwise could have, analysts said.

It also means interest rates on adjustable-rate mortgages that are scheduled to reset won't go up as much, easing the potential of severe payment shock and more defaults on subprime loans to borrowers with shaky credit.

Mortgage lenders and Wall Street had been lobbying hard for the Fed to cut rates.

Even so, Robert Toll, CEO of Horsham, Pa.-based homebuilder Toll Brothers Inc., said the Fed's action won't resolve the subprime mortgage crisis that has put the brakes on a housing market rebound.

Speaking at a separate investors' conference, Toll said a return to conventional underwriting standards by lenders would make a difference. He also warned that the housing market has yet to see its worst days.

"Does anybody want to call this as the bottom because of the Fed cut?" Toll said. "I don't think you can call it yet."

Two barometers of the housing market did little to suggest improvement in the near-term.

A tally of foreclosure filings in August more than doubled nationwide from the year-ago period and jumped 36 percent from July, according to Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc. The filings include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions.

In addition, an index of developers' expectations of future home sales by the National Association of Home Builders fell this month — the seventh straight monthly decline.

The index fell to the same level as January 1991, the time of another housing slump.

Declining builder confidence was seen in all parts of the country. The index was lowest in the Midwest and highest in the Northeast.

"Builders are expressing concern that home buyers are getting spooked by the many headlines they are seeing on mortgage market issues and their continuing effects on the housing market and home prices," the group's president, Brian Catalde, said in a statement.

Still, the homebuilders' group projected the market will turn around in less than a year.

Declining sales and lagging home values have sent the once high-flying U.S. housing market into a protracted tailspin. Delinquencies and foreclosures among financially strapped borrowers, especially those with subprime loans, have risen dramatically this past year.

The spike in foreclosure activity has prompted lenders, many struggling for cash and coping with bad loans on their balance sheets, to tighten lending, making it harder for homeowners to refinance or for new buyers to enter the market.

"The near-term issues our industry has faced, such as rising delinquencies and the resulting secondary market disruption, have repainted the entire mortgage finance landscape, unfortunately curtailing credit for many deserving borrowers," Mozilo noted.