In fall 2008, after Lehman Brothers collapsed and other Wall Street firms seemed ready to topple, New York appeared to be headed for a brutal recession, one that would rival the worst downturns in the city’s history.

Now city officials and private economists are revising their forecasts with a drastic change in tone. The gathering consensus is that the recession is nearly over in the city and, largely because of the enormous amount of federal aid poured into the big banks, the toll on New York will be much less severe than most had feared.

Not only will the job losses in the city fall far short of the recession that wracked the metropolitan area in the early 1990s, economists and analysts say they will also not measure up to the losses in the shorter, shallower recession that surrounded the 9/11 attacks. Where once the projections called for employment in the city to decline by as many as 300,000 jobs, they now estimate the losses will be about 200,000.

Nobody is playing down the damage that the financial crisis has caused in the city. The unemployment rate hit 10.6 percent in December, more residents are unemployed than at any time in at least 34 years, and the city and the state are cutting services to bridge growing budget gaps.