The house of cards real estate problem

I know that the brillant economic minds in Washington such as Greenspan keep telling us that it's not going to be a problem, but as this article points out, there are so many people connected to the housing boom industry that when it grinds to a halt or worse, the economy is going to be in serious trouble. The range of people go from banks, to suppliers to builders to lawyers and more.

Just looking at the numbers should make anyone nervous because in its current state, 16% of the US gross domestic product comes from this sector. The residential housing market has added 700,000 jobs in the last few years during a period of mass layoffs by corporate America.

Anyone who was around during the last real estate crash is no doubt familiar with the talk of bigger and better and never-ending growth talk, even right up to final days of the crash. It's hard to say when but my money is that this will end much like the dot com "soft landing" that we had a few years ago.