Impact of the Housing Crash on Consumption

Bruce Bartlett has an interesting blog post in the NYT talking about changes in patterns of wealth distribution in recent years. Bartlett points out that the recent rise in the stock market is likely to provide little benefit to most middle income families since they have little, if any, wealth in the stock market. By contrast, the value of the housing stock is still far below its pre-recession level, at $17.7 trillion at the end of 2012 compared to a peak of $22.7 trillion in 2006. Bartlett...