One of my father's friends wants to sell his house now and rent for a few years to sidestep the drop -- that's the new trade, short your own home! Imagine if an entire neighborhood agreed to doing this simultaneously One lady to another at tupperware party: "Bear raid, anyone?"
You would be amazed at the things you can learn from a lap dance!! If you think of your house as a place to live, not an investment and can service the debt, then you should have no problems.
You are late to short the housing stocks, many double topped a while ago and are down hard now. You may wish to wait for a rally before going short. Home demand remains strong but it seems likely the refinancing binge will force many into a position of carrying too much debt. This will produce foreclosures and greater leniency on outstanding debt by lenders and the amount of each remains to be seen.
Someone mentioned that people aren't refinancing to buy a lifestyle hasn't been to So Cal. People here have re-fied and bought $100K boats for the river, dune-buggies and enclosed trailers in the 70K range, Mercedes, Porsches and any other high end auto you can think of to satisfy the itch. Others have done re-fies to stash money in anticipation of the bubble bursting. Whatever happens it should be interesting.
Greenspans findings concerning real estate, equities, wealth, and spending(which he says is supporting the economy). Two kinds of wealth 1. Stock wealth ...Major wealth component of top 20% wealthiest people (minority). 2. Home wealth ...Major wealth component of bottom 80% wealthiest people (majority). Wealth supports spending, spending supports the economy. People became wealthier between 1990 and 2000 because of increased stock wealth and home wealth. Even though stock wealth is way down real estate wealth is still high so 80% of society are still spending. Spending hasn't gone down in the last 2 years as far as it went up in the previous 8-10 years because of increased home wealth. . A large part of the rise in debt in the last few years is in mortgage debt but real estate equity is up more than mortgage debt. . Greenspan is basically saying that spending is being supported right now by real estate whereas it was being supported by both real estate and equities before.