On Monday, a Business2.0 blog post (Scary Housing Bubble Graph) pointed to a compelling NY Times article (Be Warned: Mr. Bubble’s Worried Again). The article profiles an economist who predicts the following about today’s housing market:

Today, nine years after his lunch with Mr. Greenspan and five years after the markets finally did crash, Mr. Shiller is sounding the same warning for real estate that he did for stocks. In speeches, in television and radio interviews and in a second edition of his prophetic 2000 book, “Irrational Exuberance,” he is arguing that the housing craze is another bubble destined to end badly, just as every other real-estate boom on record has.

These, in short, are his second 15 minutes of gloom. He predicts that prices could fall 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms over the next generation and that the end of the bubble will probably cause a recession at some point.

Then I saw Mortgage banks dispell housing bubble notion come across my RSS feed from the Dallas Morning News. Credit Union Times also picked up the story in today’s email version, giving it a better-fitting headline – “Housing Bubble? MBA Advises Caution, Not Panic.” (By the way, dispell’s correct spelling is actually dispel – so someone misspelled dispel. Clever, eh?)

If the bubble bursts (just talking worst-case scenario here), what actions should a credit union take? Is there a responsibility on the part of credit unions to warn/educate members if the economic indicators signal the worst-case scenario is inevitable?