There Goes the Neighborhood - Why home prices are about to plummet--and take the recovery with them.

One of my favorite articles.. and remember when Greenspan this spring in testimony said that Americans would be wise to refi with adjustable rate mortgage loans, vs. fixed? Knowing that rates were going to be going up - BIG TIME? Gotta wonder what the heck that was about - unless it indeed was corruption at work - refi's to pull cash out of houses to fund short term consumer spening to make big Al and GWB look good?

Here's a section of the article:

There are many strange things about the choppy recovery we're in, but among the most curious is that it is being fueled largely by consumer spending. Why consumers should continue to spend, and why they've done it throughout the recession, is not immediately obvious. After all, average income growth has been puny in the last few years. There's been a big falloff in jobs. Health care and tuition costs have only been going up. And the stock market has spent the last three years unsuccessfully huffing and puffing to get back to the level where it was in early 2001. Why have consumers been spending so much?

Economists have advanced two main reasons. One is that Americans have so lost their moorings that they've had few qualms about going deep into debt. That's certainly true. The average person's debt as a percentage of his income is now higher than it's ever been. But there's another reason, too: Americans have been using their homes as ATM machines, refinancing their mortgages in order to fund their spending