Americans have not seen the worst of the housing crisis and must grow accustomed to surging inflation, one of Wall Street's leading economists warned today, as the US suffered the sharpest rise in foreclosures on record.

Kevin Logan, chief economist at Dresdner Kleinwort, the investment bank in New York, predicted that inflation will continue to rise to as much as 5 per cent by August as food and fuel costs show no sign of slowing.

He also warned that house prices, construction activity and property sales may fall steeply until well into next year.

His comments offer little comfort to American homeowners who last month suffered the sharpest rise in forclosures on record.

At the same time, official figures from Washington showed that the cost of living had risen by another 0.6 per cent compared with the month before, up to an annual rate of 4.2 per cent.

According to RealtyTrac, the US foreclosure monitor, the number of homeowners falling into serious arrears with their mortgage payments jumped by 48 per cent in May compared with the same period the year before.

Last month, 261,255 American homeowners filed for foreclosure, with one in every 483 households across the country having either lost or on the brink of losing their home.

While the rate of foreclosures in Ohio slowed slightly, the crisis deepened in states such as Nevada, California, Arizona, Florida and Michigan.

In Nevada, one in every 118 households received a foreclosure-related notice last month, more than four times the national rate. In California, one in every 183 households faced foreclosure.

The foreclosure process refers to any homeowner who is more than a month in arrears with mortgage repayments but also includes a property owner who has been served a default notice, whose home has been repossessed by the bank or whose property is about to be auctioned.

At the same time, while homeowners struggled to keep pace with their mortgage repayments, Americans also had to cope with the fastest increase in inflation since November. Food prices rose 0.3 per cent last month, while energy costs jumped 4.4 per cent over the same period.

Rising inflation has applied pressure on the US Federal Reserve Bank to start increasing interest rates from current levels of 2 per cent in an attempt to stem prices.

Mr Logan added: "The probability has shifted. In April, the Fed appeared to say that it had finished cutting rates. Now the signal has changed. There are real concerns about inflation. But I think the Fed will not move to raise rates until next year - it will not want to run the risk of tipping the economy into a more severe recession."

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