The Wall Street Journal has this look at the housing markets 'landing.' "Home prices in some parts of the country are falling. Builders are scaling back. Bubble or not, the biggest housing boom in recent U.S. history is coming to an end. Now here is the big question: How bad will the aftermath be?"

"'We could be underestimating the dark side,' says Mark Zandi, chief U.S. economist at Moody's Economy.com and among the first to seek to quantify the housing boom's broader effects. 'Euphoria could turn into abject pessimism very quickly.'"

"Economists, however, have few clues on which to base their predictions. Today's housing boom differs radically from its predecessors. For one, it has been bigger and longer-lived. House prices are still more than twice the level of 1991, when the boom began."

"Much of the recent increase has been driven by an unprecedented flood of cash into U.S. capital markets. Global demand for U.S. mortgage bonds, competition among big national lenders and the advent of exotic loans have made it easier than ever to borrow money to buy a house, and to turn rising home values into cash."

"There is reason to believe home builders will have to pull back more sharply. That is because the leveling off of house prices changes the equation of homeownership. Inflation-adjusted mortgage rates, the interest rate on a typical 30-year mortgage minus the percentage rise in home prices, are on track to turn positive for the first time since 2001."

"When housing took a similar turn in the 1970s, new-home sales quickly fell to their long-term norm. This time around, that would entail about a 50%, says economist Ian Shepherdson. He estimates that the resulting decline in residential construction would subtract about 1.5 percentage points from annual GDP growth in each of the next two years. 'It's a 15-year bubble unwinding in two years,' Mr. Shepherdson says. 'It's going to hurt.'"

"Economists can't quantify some risks, including the biggest: the chance that a sharp drop in house prices, what economists call a 'disorderly downturn,' would leave many homeowners owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. If that led to a wave of foreclosures and losses on riskier mortgage-backed securities, banks and investors could get spooked and cut back on all kinds of lending, a move that could snuff out economic growth."

"'For me, the risk of a disorderly downturn is the greater one,' says Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs. 'That's a scenario that people would worry about a lot, because typically recessions are the result of a general unwillingness to lend.'"