That's right. The housing bubble has yet to stabilize, and there is no painless way for that to happen. If these guidelines are enforced, will there be further pain? Yes. Of course. Housing prices have to drop further, and many thousands of people who don't belong in the housing market need to leave the market. There will be a long time processing the wretched excesses of the last ten-twenty years.
But those consequences are certain anyway, regardless. Anyone who thought we could finesse our way out of this fiasco without paying the price as a country just hasn't been paying attention.
Housing prices have to drop further, and many thousands of people who don't belong in the housing market need to leave the market. There will be a long time processing the wretched excesses of the last ten-twenty years. Problem is, you can take that argument all the way back to the housing boom after WW II. Since we've erased roughly ten years of gains from the real estate market, how far back do you propose that we need to go before there's "fair value"?