WASHINGTON: When policy makers at the Federal Reserve meet to set interest rates Tuesday, their debate is likely to be less about whether to reduce rates than about how much.

The meeting is also likely to be a defining moment for Ben Bernanke, who has not had to wrestle with a major economic upheaval since he took over as Fed chairman in February 2006. Wall Street, frightened by the turmoil in credit markets and in housing, is betting that the central bank will cut rates deeply. But Bernanke wants to know if the overall economy is on the brink of a recession, and the evidence on that is far from decisive.

Investors now assume that the central bank will reduce the overnight federal funds rate by at least one-quarter of a percentage point, to 5 percent. Fed officials have not tried to dissuade that assumption. But there is a possibility that the central bank will go further, reducing its benchmark rate by half a percentage point and signaling further reductions this year.

Bernanke and other Fed officials have said they do not want to be rescuers of last resort for investors or real estate speculators who made bad decisions.

Fed officials are also mindful of their experience in 1998, when a financial collapse in Russia led to a panic in credit markets but not a slowdown in the overall economy. The central bank reduced rates twice in response to market fears, but the panic subsided almost as quickly as it began.

“Monetary policys unswerving focus should be on pursuing the Feds mandated goals of price stability and full employment,” Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said in a speech Monday. “Past experience does show that financial turbulence can be resolved more quickly than seems likely when were in the middle of it.”

In practice, the line between rescuing financial markets and rescuing the overall economy is far from clear. Bernanke faces big risks, either by acting prematurely and giving investors the impression the Fed will shield them from risk - or by acting too slowly and allowing a recession to set in.

Nearly a month after the Federal Reserve took its first steps to make money available for financial institutions rocked by problems with subprime mortgages, the panic in credit markets has relaxed slightly but conditions remain far from normal, according to industry executives.

Data released Thursday suggested that investors fears about buying commercial paper - securities backed by mortgages, credit card debt and business loans - might be easing, one of the reasons the stock market was on the upswing Thursday. Markets in Asia on Friday were also higher.

The Fed reported that the volume of commercial paper declined by $8 billion for the week that ended Wednesday, a much smaller fall than in the four previous weeks, when investors first began to panic about subprime mortgages. Over the four weeks to Sept. 5, the volume of commercial paper shrank by an average of $74.6 billion each week.

But Steven Weiting, an economist at Citigroup, cautioned that recent signs of a recovery in the commercial paper market have been fleeting. That would bode ill for the slumping housing market, which depends on the availability of capital for mortgages. Sales of new and existing homes remain weak, inventories of unsold homes are at their highest levels in years and delinquencies are rising.

The overall U.S. economy, by contrast, has yet to show signs of serious damage.

The most disturbing sign of emerging trouble came in the Labor Departments employment report for August, which estimated that the United States lost 4,000 jobs last month - the first monthly decline in four years. More worrisome, the Labor Department reduced its previous estimates for employment growth in June and July by a total of 81,000 jobs.

But even some economists who see a high risk of recession say the statistical evidence of a downturn is not strong enough at this point to persuade many Fed officials of the threat.

Kurt Karl, chief U.S. economist at the reinsurer Swiss Re, estimates the likelihood of a recession at “35 percent and rising,” but he predicted that the Fed would reduce its federal funds rate by only one-quarter of a percentage point Tuesday.

Yet, in a flurry of recent speeches, several Fed officials have made it clear they see a risk that the current housing problems and the credit crunch could infect the rest of the economy.

EDINBURGH, Scotland, June 13 (UPI) — Scotland may face energy supply problems as one of its two nuclear plants was taken offline during a cooling emergency over the weekend.

The Hunterston B plant in Ayrshire was taken offline by staff Sunday night after temperature control problems at one of the plant’s reactors, The Scotsman reports. The plant was offline until a month ago after repairs on cracked pipes.

British Energy, which operates the plant, says investigations are continuing and a restart date is not known.

While the government is looking to extend the life of the plant, as well as Torness, in East Lothian, it is against building any new plants. The two plants provide 40 percent of Scotland’s electricity.

“I think this is quite serious when you look at the knock-on effects of Hunterston B closing down,” said nuclear consultant John Large. “There could be shortfalls.”

Former Scotland Energy Minister Brian Wilson said without any new nuclear plants built and the current plants closing, “it will certainly leave Scotland with an energy gap.”

He said Scotland will then buy electricity from the rest of Britain, which likely will come in part, at least, from nuclear power.

“It is foolish to rule out the nuclear option,” said Labor Party energy spokesman Iain Gray. “Certainly, on a U.K. basis, it could be part of filling the gap as and when the current stations shut down.”

“British Energy should not be seeking any life-extension for such a facility,” said Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland. “Thankfully, as has been the case for many years, Scotland is well supplied with alternative energy sources.”

A government spokesman said the Hunterston problem highlights the need to move from nuclear.

Nuclear energy is 16 percent of the world’s electricity production, according to the World Nuclear Association. Demand for energy is growing, expected to nearly double by 2030.

Scotland is home to four of Britain’s 19 reactors, generating a fifth of its electricity. The WNA, citing current government policy, expects all but one shut by 2023. A recent draft energy plan would turn that around, however, increasing the role nuclear power plays there.

ASPEN, Colorado: Some brokers have to shout to sell real estate in a glutted market, or employ ever more tortured elocutions of spin.

Joshua Saslove whispers.

His companys premier listing, called Hala Ranch, is an estate of 95 acres, or 38 hectares, built in 1991 for the family of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to the United States from Saudi Arabia and the homes only, and only occasional, occupant.

At $135 million, Hala is the most expensive single-family residential property on the market in the United States, Saslove said. Selling it mostly consists of saying “no.”

Saslove has received about 1,000 requests to tour the home since last October, when it went on sale, and he, along with lawyers for the prince who review every call, have granted only 11 of them. This is what high-mountain hideaway money in Aspen has come down to: Even the ordinary rich can no longer press their noses to the glass.

In the marketing of Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, nonbillionaires need not apply. Hala will almost certainly, Saslove believes, be a new owners second, third or fourth home.

Money on that scale does not just stumble in off the street. There are 946 billionaires, according to a tally by Forbes magazine, keeping the list of potential buyers relatively short.

Saslove and the Hala property manager, Martha Grimes, 57, who arrived in Aspen right after college, saw the town when elements of the old hippie counterculture and Hollywood celebrity style were melding. Grimes worked as a waitress and later a horse wrangler on the very ranch land that later became Hala.

“I remember this hill, this very hill, because I used to ride my horse through here,” she said as she led a tour through the house for a reporter and a photographer on a recent afternoon.

“The 70s were really magical,” she added. “But the characters from those days are disappearing.”

Saslove said that people like Bandar, who is now the secretary general of the Saudi National Security Council and is not spending as much time in the United States as he once did, helped establish Aspen style, which is much more about family, culture and art - and wealth that even Hollywood stars cannot match.

“I dont see as much braggadocio as I used to,” Saslove said.

In Bandars 22 years as Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, a tenure that ended in 2005, he was a powerful ally to a succession of presidents. More recently, however, British media accounts have said that a major British arms contractor paid more than $2 billion clandestinely into bank accounts in Washington controlled by Bandar. The prince has denied the allegations.

At 56,000 square feet, or 5,200 square meters, Hala is bigger than the White House, with a staff of 12. It has 15 bedrooms, 16 baths, a private barbershop and beauty salon just off the master suite and enough space for a party of 450 people.

Many of the rooms are huge, with banks of windows overlooking the Aspen Valley and the mountains beyond. There are few proclamations of grandiosity beyond the occasional artwork, like the Albert Bierstadt painting that hangs over the main fireplace. (It does not come with the house.) Dark, gleaming wood beams, all with notched construction and not a single nailhead showing, pale plaster walls and television screens dominate the decor.

It is not a house for a family that putters in the kitchen, which is in the basement, the province of professional chefs with its stainless-steel everything and rows of hanging pots. Housekeepers were ironing the sheets in the nearby laundry, feeding them through a giant pressing machine.

Saslove, whose company, Joshua Company, is an affiliate of Great Estates, the real estate arm of Christies auction house, said homes that cost about a million dollars in the 1970s now might sell for nine times that.