Don't Listen To Wall Street

The US Housing Bust IS a Big Deal

As U.S. home prices at the national level begin to decline for the first time since the Great Depression, most Wall Street analysts maintain their rosy outlook for the U.S. economy by allowing hope to triumph over experience. For while they concede that any bottom to the housing market bust is slipping ever further into the distant future, they hew to the view that the U.S. housing sector is far too small to derail the overall U.S. economy.

In maintaining their rosy economic outlook, most Wall Street analysts choose to ignore Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's recent reminder that a protracted decline in home prices could have a material impact on consumer spending. According to Mr. Bernanke's congressional testimony last week, the Federal Reserve estimates that household consumption could be negatively impacted by as much as 9 cents for every dollar that home prices decline on a sustained basis. And considering that housing wealth, which is the main source of household wealth, presently amounts to 150 percent of GDP, and that household consumption still accounts for around 70 percent of GDP, the prospect of a protracted period of declining home prices is not something one wants to cavalierly brush aside.

Contrary to what many on Wall Street would have us believe, the prospect of a protracted period of declining home prices now seems to be anything but a remote possibility. Indeed, with home prices already falling and with increased inventories of unsold homes rapidly mounting, it is difficult to see how home prices do not start falling at an accelerating rate over the next few months in order to clear a saturated market. This would seem to be all the more so the case as a tightening in mortgage lending standards and as the resetting of adjustable rate mortgages further crimp housing demand at the very same time that a marked increase in home foreclosures leads to more houses returning to an already glutted market.

If the economy indeed slows abruptly over the next few quarters under the weight of its housing market woes, it will not be the first time that Wall Street analysts as a group missed a major turning point in the economic cycle. Rather, it will only confirm that those analysts seem to have learnt little from the bursting of the earlier dot.com bubble in 2001.

*The above article has been excerpted from Desmond Lachman’s article “The US Housing Bust Is a Big Deal,” from the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Lachman is a resident fellow at AEI. Read the entire article at http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.26627/pub_detail.asp.