They almost are! I kid you not, I just had an offer on my house fall through due to loan-to-value being not to the banks liking. Thanks to a government program (WHEDA), the prospective buyer only had $1000 of his own money in the game. He needed to come up with an additional $2000 more cash down to satisfy the bank's LTV requirement. He couldn't do it. He's not without a job, but this tells me the banks are right back to making 97%+ mortgages to people that have no business making offers to purchase >$100K property.

I'm a natural born contrarian, and I think in terms of decision trees and probabilities. I am not trying to make a case for either expansion or contraction, but I know that when economists are united in calling for a strong recovery the 2nd half of the year, as they have been; when US equity indices are setting new records; and when there is a relentless barage of news articles about the "recovery"; I get interested in the contrary case. For one thing, the majority is seldom right about the future path of the economy; its view of the future is generally a linear extrapolation of the past. More meaningfully, when markets and sentiment all line up on one side, it can be extraordinarily lucrative to take the other side. It is a strategy with which a speculator has to be willing to suffer some pain, but the ultimate payout can be huge. I never try to be dogmatic about the economy and financial markets, but even the government's own statistics, like these housing numbers, are not uniformly positive, and we did, after all, print negative 1st quarter growth. I can't and won't swear the economy is heading into a recession, but the speculative stars are in perfect alignment to make that bet against the consensus. Again, it's all decisions trees, probabilities, and the payoff matrix, not unshakeable conviction.