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I strongly agree. I've heard claims that equity withdrawal added 1% (or more) onto GDP growth during the boom over the last decade in the US and UK. I've not seen any Australian figures, but would guess it's the same. So even those of us who weren't riding the property bubble benefited...

To be fair, only about a dozen economists predicted the GFC, including forum favourite Steve Keen. (OK, Shadow disagrees on that one. :)) Reinhart and Rogoff make the point in This Time is Different (link to PDF summary) that sovereign crises tend to follow banking crises, and also commodity...

I think that a positively geared property or a development site is probably not a bad place to park your money. In fact, my uncle bought a couple of building plots in the Scottish Borders in 2007 or 2008, and whilst they're probably down a bit, he said at the time that he preferred having them...

Australia probably escaped the GFC is because its economy is tied more into the Asian region than the Atlantic (Europe and the Americas), and it also indirectly benefited from the massive Chinese stimulus programme. As such I think that a hard landing in China is more likely to have an impact...