...A story at Bloomberg News on Wednesday morning caught the eye of the editorial team here at HW - a new joint study from senior researchers at both the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate and the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate takes a look at housing wealth effects on personal consumption.
The study is telling, in particular, because it finds strong evidence not only of housing's critical role in pumping up GDP during the recent boom years - but also suggests just how painful the downward pull of falling home prices really will be to the nation's economy going forward. It finds empirical evidence that the effects of housing wealth, either through gain or loss, far trump the more traditional effects of "financial wealth" gained via the nation's equity and broader financial markets...
October 29, 2008