I'm not sure how much you should trust their numbers, because this:<p>&#62;25% of homeowners are underwater<p>is probably not true.  In the US less than 2/3 of houses even have mortgages and most of them are not in areas that dropped in value significantly (my house's appraisal went up slightly last year, after going down about a third of that 3 years before that).  And from what I have read, most countries have a smaller percentage of home mortgages than the US does.<p>(This is from memory from general reading - that's why I wrote probably - I didn't feel like digging for the specific numbers.)