They’ll take a phrase like, “there’s no time like adversity to go out and find opportunity,” and run with it. Only problem we can see is, there are too many of them gunning for the same opportunity, so more lose than not.

In his post today, Jamie Pirrello lends sharp insight into the structural over-capacity of the home building landscape right now. He notes that demand may well exist, but if the same demand is met by multiple competitors, then somebody wins, and the rest represent excess supply to the market. That’s certain hardship, and, as the small-print on lots of new pharmaceutical offerings often reads, may cause death.

A snippet from the Pirrello take on what’s next:

If builders don’t build too many specs and the tax credit is not extended and interest rates don’t jump to such a point where buyers are willing to forego the tax credit hopeful of lower interest rates in the future, then building specs should generate additional profits.

If on the other hand, builders build specs and too many are built or the tax credit is extended or interest rates rise to the point where buyers leave the market temporarily, then builders could be in a difficult situation. Standing unsold and completed inventory may pressure banks to demand repayment on the related construction loans. In addition, builders may need to heavily discount their spec homes as all competitors will be struggling with excess inventory and the need to discount the price of their homes.

The tail-wind real estate players, including home building companies, enjoyed for the past few months — the first positive conditions they’ve experienced in seven or eight quarters — consisted of four forces that joined, almost miraculously.

Seasonality was one of the unpredictable ones, given that two previous “spring selling seasons” came and went in 2007 and 2008, with nothing good to say about either. A stimulus-package $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, eye-poppingly low interest rates, and home prices dramatically reduced off their 2007 peaks were the other three drivers of the recent flurry in activity.

HousingWire reports:

Tax credit availability and competitive low-end pricing drove the sales, according to the survey. The home buyer tax credit monetization toward closing costs on FHA loans, announced by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, may contribute to driving sales in coming reports, as 36% of respondents expect a boost of 11% to 25% more sales per month in response to the credit monetization.

Countering those aiding winds are the buffeting blasts of foreclosures, tight home mortgage credit, appraisal hell, and a banker’s joke formerly known as construction lending.

Still, home builders believe they’re beginning to sense the darkest hour before the dawn, and they’re trying to contain their glee.

Here’s how John Burns Real Estate Consulting sums up its 306-executive panel of home building executives weighing in on market conditions:

Despite the continued negative numbers, this month’s commentary is the most optimistic we have seen since the survey began one year ago.  Many builders believe we are approaching bottom, particularly in some of the most distressed markets, such as Phoenix.

The conviction of these respondents is that they’ve now seen the worst that the market can throw at them, and now is time for a floor to set in.

Still, now is a kind of new moment of truth for home builders.

A very high stakes game of chicken is about to unfold through the balance of 2009, and one of the most interesting factors to watch is what home builders wish for. As in be careful what you wish for.

Here’s a statement from NAHB Chairman Joe Robson that encapsulates what home builders are wishing for:

Due to expire at the end of November, the current $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit has proved to be an effective policy targeted toward a specific demographic group that is showing tangible results. Enhancing this credit would help to stoke the economic engine at a key point in our recovery.

But home builders must be careful what they wish for here. If the $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers worked as an incentive, part of its effectiveness has been to induce a fear of missing out on it.

If home buyers feel that the government will just keep adding months to the incentive, it will lose its teeth. 

So, during the next 30 to 60 days, home builders of all stripes will be taking some big chances amidst some pretty tough odds.

Since it takes roughly 80 days start-to-finish building time to complete a new-home for sale, and since roughly half of homes sold these days are at least started on spec, the game of chicken will be a three-way affair.

Home builders in the most active markets will be betting on their share of a demand as it may go, based on a promising last few months, and a guess that as the clock on the current $8k credit ticks down to the end of November.

No one will want to leave potential sales on the table as that current rebate program runs out.

Player number two in the game of chicken will be The Administration and Congress. Do they “enhance” the tax credit–possibly even goose it–or let it run out this year?

Third, and most important, are potential home buyers. They’ll be balancing several important psychological factors, and will probably have greater visibility by September or October on their own income stability and the direction of the overall economy

If they’re seriously afraid they’re going to miss their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy a first home at a moment when price, mortgage rates, and tax credit are still in full force, but not for long, then they’ll be all over it to get their deals done before the expiration.

So, if home builders get what they want, and get an extension on the credit, they may be removing one of the key motivators toward getting home buyers off the sideline.

One way or another, the fact that more home builders are optimistic things are improving probably means that more home builders will be voting with their feet in the next couple of months.

We’ll likely see a gust of starts in the next 30 to 60 days, all about meeting deadlines for the expiration of the Federal tax credit.

There’ll be hell to pay if the deadline is suddenly lifted, leaving no hard stop to the benefit of a home buyer acting sooner than later.

Dr. Doom's Top 9

The crucial issue, however, is not when the global economy will bottom out, but whether the global recovery – whenever it comes – will be robust or weak over the medium term. One cannot rule out a couple of quarters of sharp GDP growth as the inventory cycle and the massive policy boost lead to a short-term revival. But those tentative green shoots that we hear so much about these days may well be overrun by yellow weeds even in the medium term, heralding a weak global recovery over the next two years.

For Roubini, the economy’s antonym for Houdini, continued doom has nine principal causes, which he happily enumerates here.

Still, that’s not as bad as it was a few months ago. Then, it would have been a Top 10 list.

What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom. — Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind

And wouldn’t that be a good thing for home builders? Wachovia senior housing analyst Carl Reichardt, who’s been heeding his “Neighborhood Watch” network of 150 in-the-field sales managers at new-home communities in 20 markets for more than a decade now makes this call. “We now believe that field conditions saw their low ebb in early 2009.”

This is carefully worded, and it doesn’t touch home price stabilization with a 10-foot pole, as it shouldn’t. But field conditions at a low ebb earlier this year–i.e. the bottom–”by any other name would smell as sweet.”

The caveats?

Clearly, upward pressure on interest rates, insofar as that force messes with monthly payment seductions that–paired up with the U.S. government $8,000-first-time-home-buyer tax credit, historically low home price tags, and any further state inducements–have ignited sales in more than a few isolated markets and gotten many home building company past catatonic despair to a state more akin to mere agony.

“In May, we had our best-selling month since June of last year,” the CEO of one of the nation’s Top 10 home building companies told us this morning. He continued, “Yes, I’m very concerned about where interest rates have headed, but our first week of June was the best one-week sales period for more than two years.”

He’s not one to count on policy’s helping hand, but he’s heard tell that during the summer, several measures that would extend–and possibly even increase the amount–the effective term of the U.S. government’s tax credit program for first-time homeowners will make their way into committee as part of either another stimulus package or as separate initiatives.

Typically, housing recoveries show up first in stocks, then home sales volumes, followed down the road by price stability. It’s widely believed now that stocks may need to re-test their lows before volume builds up support for a sustainable rally. So, if the typical recovery plays out, it’s still premature to say it’s underway.

A bottom, however, is a different thing, and this bottom may have–how should one say it?–legs.

It’s an important inflection point Reichardt has called. Field conditions hitting their low ebb earlier this year doesn’t mean there won’t continue to be a lengthening casualty list from the ranks of home building companies who can’t or don’t make it. Those companies’ ill-advised or ill-fated deals with lenders will continue to play out as the financial debacle unwinds. 

How much capacity home building needs at the end of the day is still in question. How many home buyers the credit crisis has pent up vs. how many home buyers may have been borrowed from the future by easy money policy is still a healthy debate. True demand is still elusive–it’s somewhere between played-out and pent up.

However, we expect our coverage in the months ahead to take a decidedly different tack as well. Just as back in the Resolution Trust Corp. days many entrepreneurs got their start and a few power players consolidated their empires, we believe that by the end of the summer, there’ll be a stream of start-ups to offset the shut-downs. We’re already getting word of a few “come-back kids” who’ll raise an eyebrow or two once they officially hang up their shingle.

Bottom line is “affordability” for home buyers hasn’t been where it is now since at least 1993. It may need to get even better to seriously move the needle for home builders. So land, and all the other costs of labor and materials, had better get to be pretty dirt cheap.

What’s good for home builders may be bad from the ones they buy their raw materials from. But then the cycle will have begun again.

Now, just when data starts rolling in that supports this alignment, interest rates have begun shaking loose from their virtuous bond with more affordable house prices and a kick-back from Uncle Sam or a state for a home purchase.

The Wall Street Journal leads this a.m. with its take on the quantum leap percentage point-plus increase in mortgage rates since the end of May.

“Mortgage rates at these levels will hobble the [housing] recovery, and it was just the beginning of the recovery,” says Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Investors have been anxiously watching bond yields climb over the past few weeks, pushing up mortgage rates, which normally track 10-year Treasury notes. The yield on the those briefly hit 4% on Wednesday afternoon for the first time since mid-October before ending the day at 3.937%.

Many policy makers see the rise in Treasury yields as a sign that investors are optimistic that the economy is on the mend. But many market participants say higher long-term bond yields indicate investors are increasingly worried about inflation.

What unfortunate timing! Look at a key “take-away” from Wachovia senior analyst Carl Reichardt’s latest “Neighborhood Watch Survey” of new-home community sales managers. 

With three straight surveys and a broader base of SMs reporting better-than-expected sales and traffic, we now believe that field conditions saw their low ebb in early 2009. While seasonality plays some role in our data, SMs expect strength this time of year, yet still see activity above these expectations.

This verbiage is rosy, given where it’s coming from. Reichardt notes that upward pressure on interest rates may stall the new-found momentum. Other analysts point also to the fact that tax credit programs for first-time home buyers expire on a Federal level by the end of calendar 2009, and state-funded programs will only last until the coffers run dry.

Hanley Wood Market Intelligence has done an extensive market-by-market analysis that ties the effecitve date of California’s $10K tax credit to new-home purchase activity. The Orange County Register’s Jonathan Lansner quoted the HWMI study at length in his blog post about how the O.C. was SOL when it came to an upside of the combined California and U.S. government tax credits for home purchases.

Click to Enlarge graph of Hanley Wood Market Intelligence Data.

Costa Mesa-based Hanley Wood Market Intelligence reports that Orange County buyers signed 35% fewer sales contracts for new homes in March and April, the first months of a homebuyer tax credit designed to spur the purchase of newly built residences.

The California program gives homebuyers a tax credit of up to $10,000 for new single-family homes selling after March 1. (Uncle Sam will chip in another $8,000 if you’re a first-time buyer!) But while demand has been high statewide for the California tax credit, that has yet to impact the pace of sales and construction here:

What Lansner neglects to report on is whether the 35% decline year-on-year for the two-month March/April period is more or less than the decline year-on-year from, say January-February of 2009 from a year earlier.

He does acknowledge that statewide, the $10,000 tax-credit appeared to have jumpstarted sales in many communities. 

In Reichardt’s Neighborhood Watch survey, he notes:

Trends in the West — especially No Cal — made a surprising turn as SMs cited the strongest sales trends compared to expectations.

The big question post the “Spring Selling Season” uptick must be how to keep whatever momentum there is in the market going through the balance of the year… especially without the critical tailwind of low, low interest rates.

California, as of June, is said to be 85% through its $100-million allocation for home buyer tax credits, and nobody expects below 5% home loan rates to come back to roost anytime soon.

Here’s Calculated Risk’s take on mortgage rate trends, and how to stay ahead of the curve on them:

Here is a new tool from Political Calculations: Predicting Mortgage Rates and Treasury Yields
This is based off the chart I posted last Friday and is very timely with the Ten Year Yield pushing 4%.
Using their tool, with the Ten Year yield at 3.99%, this suggests that 30 year mortgage rates will rise to 5.8% based on the historical relationship between the Ten Year yield and mortgage rates.

The question is, does the demand resubmerge when the three stars are not in alignment? Will those who move off the sidelines because of the sense that “there will never be a better time to buy” now begin to feel they’ll do better if they wait out further house price declines?

As most new-home builders have discovered, the monthly payments riddle is the one they need most critically to solve. If interest rates go up, prices have to go down to solve that riddle.

It strongly suggests that in the current policy environment, a strong likelihood is that Fix Housing First’s original plan for both a compelling tax credit and a mortgage buy-down may do the trick of sparking demand, clearing more inventory, restoring scarcity, and putting a new floor of value under residential real estate.

We see a Stimulus 2.0 package emerging during the Fall session of Congress, designed to capture any green shoots still out there, and accelerate the economy’s ability to begin paying down the “Wall of Capital” with which the Fed and Co. met the economic crisis starting last Fall. A mortgage buy-down might likely be in that program, to test new residential construction’s capacity to serve an accustomed role as an engine driving the broader economy.

This would suggest that a positive outlook and a negative one are equally viable. So why not believe the more optimistic take?

Shiller is one of the smartest people today commenting on what makes the housing economy tick, and he’s the first to say he doesn’t know when it comes to predicting where it’s going to go. Mind his phrasing in an op-ed piece from the New York Times this past Saturday. He carefully uses the word “may” to say, “hey, it could go the other way, too.”

Even if there is a quick end to the recession, the housing market’s poor performance may linger. After the last home price boom, which ended about the time of the 1990-91 recession, home prices did not start moving upward, even incrementally, until 1997.

We’re ever concerned about predictions. We heard a lot of anecdotal good numbers for April, and have gotten word from a number of builders that May was just as good or even better. We heard of one home builder in the D.C. metro market who closed on 55 homes in May, a good 20% ahead of plan. In Phoenix, monthly sales in some communities are better than they’ve been dating back almost two years.

At the same time, the gathering financial storms of nonperforming commercial mortgage back securities and unrepayable credit card debt coupled with an expanding black hole of unemployment remain abstractions whose risks to forward planning may be too hard to calculate.

Have investors who’ve restored more than 40% of value to stocks from their low-point and gotten the Dow Jones in positive territory for the year factored in these forces already? Have government and Fed policies actually begun to find traction in the financial system that have started to slow the bleeding?

Here’s what we think. For most privately held home builders, especially the ones on life support who are one letter from the bank short of doom, there’s no gain whatsoever from a negative scenario. These companies are beyond scenarios altogether, and just pumping to get another sale done to keep working their way through their bank obligations for another month.

Housing prices–especially national ones–bear little relationship to the realities of these companies. They’re focused on the small ball. Build quick. Beat existing, distressed, and foreclosed properties to the punch somehow, and make it so that the monthly payments make sense to a home buyer exactly the way these companies’ own monthly payments to their lenders stay on course.

More macro financial shocks are coming. More job loss will put a drag on local economies. More household deleveraging will take money out of circulation as consumers curb their spending.

Even so, Shiller says, what happens time and time again in the history of economics is that people’s behavior frequently defies logical supply and demand behavior.

All of these people could be made to change their plans if a sharp improvement in the economy got their attention. The young couple could change their minds and decide to buy next year, and the elderly couple could decide to further postpone their selling. That would leave us with a buyer and no seller, providing an upward kick to the market price.

Can the 87% or more of people who may stay employed offset the negative feedback of those who’ll continue to swell the ranks of those involuntarily out of work during the next 12 months as the economy grapples for recovery?

Will those who are able to hang onto their jobs be confident enough in their income stability to strike while the pricing, interest rate, and Federal tax credit incentive irons are hot?

The expression one real estate/housing player uses to offer an answer to these questions is this: “You’ve got to fake it to make it.” There’s no upside to believing the downside outlook. 

For the moment, getting to ”the other side” of this mess means staying in business through tomorrow.

The Donald in all his loose canon glory speaks for about eight minutes on how real estate developers would be glad to get back in the game were it not for the banks, as well as about government financial and economic policy, and of course, about gaming.

Trump may not be the most edifying interview, but he’s a master spinner and always amusing.

Here he is on CNBC’s Sqawk Box, talking to one of the show’s hosts Joe Kernen.

By looking at where new-home sales have perked up, one can guess that California, which has added its state income tax credit of up to $10,000 to the first-time home buyer tax credit ante rolling out from the United States government, can serve as a poster child for more stimulus to jolt some virtue into those vicious cycles.

Movements in support of higher home buyer tax incentives are still operating at a state and national level.

Here’s an argument from yet another Ivy school economist about the shortcomings of the Obama plan to stabilize housing by stopping a slew of foreclosures from occurring. Yale economics professor John Geanakoplos stopped by Squawk Box to talk about foreclosures with Huffington Post diva Arianna Huffington, Becky Quick, Carl Quintanilla and Joe Kernen. Watch below to see why Geanakoplos thinks the Obama administration’s plan to prevent foreclosures will be ineffective.

Anyone who claims that the gist 120-word summary for Febuary 2009 one-family new residential sales fits his or her predictive model for how housing is behaving is not mortal, or lying.

Sure, if you’re applying disciplined economic analysis, there’s no other way to look at data for Febuary 2009 vs. data for February 2009, (notwithstanding the one-day difference due to 2008 being a leap year).

But those who are raising a ruckus about the media numbskulls who are getting it wrong by noting that the month-to-month upward swing is a positive miss at least part of the point: The barrage of adverse headlines contribute to  negative sentiment which feed negative trends. Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture blog is on a withering tear against print and TV media for inaccurately reporting on the new-home sales data.

A parade of the mathematically innumerate business writers (and even worse headline writers!) continue to misread data. The latest evidence? New Home Sales.

After incorrectly reporting the Existing Home Sales, the mainstream media misread the Census department report of New Homes.

No, New Home Sales data did not improve. In fact, they were not only not positive, they were actually horrific. The year over year number was a terrible down 41%.  Sales from this same period a year ago have nearly been halved.

Why did the media report this as positive? If you only read the headline number, you saw a positive datapoint: February was plus 4.7% over January.

To get the the facts, you need to read below the headline. In the present case, it wasn’t the seasonality factor that was confusing, it was the “90-percent confidence intervals” — or as it is more commonly known, the margin of error. (more from The Big Picture post)

There are several issues at work here, but for home builders and real estate professionals, the best advice might be this. Put your fingers in your ears and don’t listen to anyone who nay-says the little gains you’re making in your communities.

Economists–whether they’re positive or negative about the data–want an audience for their business and career interests. It seems as if some of them make a good living by telling people that the media has no credibility, and asking why anyone reads a newspaper or watches a news telecast.

Economists who profess that they’ve been right all along about what is going on in the economy are doing so because the marketability of their theories redound to their financial well-being.

Journalists, on the other hand, work for at least two bosses these days. One is their management, and the other is their audience. Always and forever, the audience is the toughest boss when it comes to the so-what? factor of relevance and accuracy of facts and perspective. Also, journalists, in more ways than ever, work collaboratively with their audiences on getting the whole story that matters, especially as citizen journalism surfaces as part of every media title and channel.

It’s illuminating to get corrected perspective and insight on the new-home data. Here’s how avuncular Calculated Risk steers people to understand how not to get too overjoyed at a blip up in new-home sales from January to February.

Click on image for access to Calculated Risk post.

This graph shows the February “rebound”.

You have to look closely – this is an eyesight test – and you will see the increase in sales (if you expand the graph).

Not only was this the worst February in the Census Bureau records, but this was the 2nd worst month ever on a seasonally adjusted annual rate basis (only January was worse).

Calculated Risk’s assertion–oft-repeated these days whether the media headline is positive or negative–is that a sales volume bottom for housing is likely in 2009.

It’s important to understand, however, the level that neither The Big Picture nor Calculated Risk matter when it comes to the viability and vitality or morbidity of home builders and real estate.

Their measures of correctness or error are on a national, macro level. They can be right, and still get it totally wrong when it comes to understanding what’s going on in home building and sales organizations in the first half and second half of 2009.

Even with the full measure of their economic skills, they’re not set up to catch the first flickers of recovery, just as they do not get the challenge of marketing and selling about 340,000 homes a year into the teeth of this environment.

Clearly, home builders are telling us that where they can get some traction with their prospective home buyers, they’re making some progress. In California, where a $10,000 tax credit jolt compliments the national $8,000 first time buyer tax credit, you’re starting to see home price correction and stimulus combine to pull people off their duffs on the sideline.

While home builders, manufacturers, and trade groups are willing to support the $8,000 tax credit initiative in the fledgling $787 billion economic stimulus program, their point organization, the Fix Housing First Coalition, is carefully watching the California front in hopes of renewing its case for a bigger one-time credit for all home buyers.

Yesterday, two House Republicans, Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.) introduced a “Responsible Homeowners Act” measure that would bring back a $15,000 tax credit for buyers of primary residences who put a minimum of 5% down on their purchase.

Economics, being the dismal science that it is, has not solved the math problem of where home prices need to correct to and what policy pushes are necessary to wrench open the spiggot of real estate transaction.

Which means home building operators and their leadership need to keep turning a deaf ear to the blather about national data points–especially ones that dowse morale, confidence, and focus–and just keep selling so that one blip can turn into two, and 30 days later, maybe a third blip in a row.

Then, even the nay-saying-est economists around will have to admit that you’re creating a blip tide, otherwise known as an economic trend.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
– William Shakespeare, English dramatist & poet (1564 – 1616)
–”Hamlet”, Act 1 scene 3

Click image for access to Geithner's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece today.

The pipeline of trillion-dollar federal policy programs today offers the latest one that has made U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner the sudden darling of Wall Street. Odd that several weeks ago–two weeks into his new job description–many of those same Wall Street denizens declared Geithner worse than useless, and as recently as last week, there were over-unders on when he would be headed out Treasury’s revolving door in ignominy.

Back those few weeks, the appetite for a groundwork of principles that would support a plan was not there, but now that the plan has been filled-out and articulated, critics are shutting up long enough for Geithner to appear to know what he’s talking about when he refers to the global financial complex and the trouble that it’s in.

Now that Wall Street investors appear to have bought-in to the details, the credibility capital Geithner seems to have lost when he opened his mouth in amid the crawl of stock tickers in mid-February now is back within his grasp.

The question remains though. What does the program fix? Borrower? Lender? Anyone?

Economics Nobelist, Princeton professor and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman spells out the administration’s and Geithner’s theory underlying the current plan to wrest toxic assets from the banking system, a theory he disagrees with.

But banks can also fail even if they haven’t been bad investors: if, for some reason, many of those they’ve borrowed from (e.g., but not only, depositors) demand their money back at once, the bank can be forced to sell assets at fire sale prices, so that assets that would have been worth more than liabilities in normal conditions end up not being enough to cover the bank’s debts. And this opens up the possibility of a self-fulfilling panic: people may demand their money back, not because they think the bank has made bad investments, but simply because they think other people will demand their money back.

Bank runs can be contagious; partly that’s for psychological reasons, partly because banks tend to invest in similar assets, so one bank’s fire sale depresses another bank’s net worth.

So now we have a bank crisis. Is it the result of fundamentally bad investment, or is it because of a self-fulfilling panic?

Clearly, the assumptions underneath the administration’s plan embrace the latter of the two causes. So the program and the process, and the articulation, and the defiance that accompanies the roll-out of the Public-Private Investment Program rely extensively on a conviction that restoring calm and confidence–even a measure of greed–will get a flow of funds going.

But the base of the problem remains. Bad loans occurred. Lenders and investors took bad risks around those loans. People bought homes they should not have bought–20%-plus of them were investor purchases for flipping purposes during the final two or three years of the run-up–and now the reset on the value or lack thereof of those loans and the investments on top of the loans, will be deferred as a complex delay-the-pain mechanism kicks into action, aggregating what was bad into a toxic pool for a later day, and setting refurbished bank balance sheets back into business like an afternoon at the dog-groomers.

The wager here is twofold. One is that investors, lured by the virtual elimination of risk, will find that this is the place for all that pent-up liquidity that had been awaiting “the floor” for asset pricing before it moved in for the strike. Two is that borrowers will exhibit a more steadfast commitment to the obligations of their loans.

In our need for instant gratification and immediate solutions, we may have a blast of “good news,” that can bouy spirits and keep stocks on an upward trajectory for the month.

But we can see in our closer look beneath the headlines on existing home sales, starts, permits, etc., that there’s a lot of work to do, and much of that work is going to be a good, old-fashioned work-out between buyer and seller based on what a property is worth today, and tomorrow, and the day after, to someone who wants to live in that property.

Borrowing and lending are part of real estate in North America. So Shakespeare’s admonition could never be taken literally. But a great dramatist and poet of today would probably figure out a way to add to the phrase somehow. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be (unless there’s sufficient skin-in-the-game for the borrower and unleveraged capital on the part of the lender).”

This is why this conversation is important to everybody in housing–single-family and multifamily. Assets have been leveled. The V in LTV is the grail of the moment.

Have a look.