Ramirez equated fear with the "unknowns" that could negatively impact housing sales, such as the specter of smaller year-end bonuses on Wall Street. The worst-case scenario for the bonuses, she said, is that they'll be down 10% to 15% over last year's all-time high, meaning that '07 will be the second-best year ever for bonuses. "That doesn't sound so bad to me," she commented.

Noting that "New York has never been in a better place," Barry Gosin, chairman of Newmark Knight Frank, called the debt crisis "an incredible opportunity" to re-rationalize the terms on which properties are acquired. He noted, however, that left unchecked the crisis could severely curtail corporate profits along with home ownership throughout the country. Gosin called on President Bush and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to "correct this" with an injection of cash and other measures, as Bernanke's predecessor, Alan Greenspan, and then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin did in September 1998. By the second quarter of 2008, Gosin said, drawing a laugh from the capacity crowd, "even this administration" will have figured out what to do about the debt crisis.

One challenge to owners and developers that's likely to persist is rising construction costs. "Construction pricing, with very few exceptions, never goes down," said Tishman. One reason is that even if the debt crisis stalls some projects from going forward, "There's still a staggering amount of construction on the books," he said. Another factor is competition for materials: last year, for example, China purchased 55% of all cement produced worldwide.