Yes, We’re Confident, but Who Knows Why

THE recovery in housing, the stock market and the overall economy has finally gained sustainable momentum — or so it is said.

That opinion seems to be based on several salient facts. Unemployment has been declining, from 10.0 percent in October 2009 to 7.7 percent last month. More spectacularly, the stock market has more than doubled since 2009 and has been especially strong for the last six months, with the Dow Jones industrial average reaching record closing highs last week and the S.& P. 500 flirting with superlatives, too.

And the housing market, seasonally adjusted, has been rising. The S.& P./Case-Shiller 20-city home price index gained 7 percent in 2012. 

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Housing Market's Future Still Has Many Clouds

WE'RE beginning to hear noises that we've reached a major turning point in the housing market - and that, with interest rates so low, this is a rare opportunity to buy. But are such observations on target? It would be comforting if they were. Yet the unfortunate truth is that the tea leaves don't clearly suggest any particular path for prices, either up or down.

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A Metaphor for Obama

NEW HAVEN – As US President Barack Obama begins his second term, he needs a simple way to express his vision and policies for the economy – a metaphor around which support for his policies might crystallize, thereby boosting his administration’s political effectiveness. So, what makes a successful metaphor work?

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Wealth Effects Revisited 1975-2012

By Karl E. Case, John M. Quigley and Robert J. Shiller

In our earlier version of this paper we found that households increase their spending when house prices rise, but we found no significant decrease in consumption when house prices fall. The results presented here with the extended data now show that declines in house prices stimulate large and significant decreases in household spending.

The elasticities implied by this work are large. An increase in real housing wealth comparable to the rise between 2001 and 2005 would, over the four years, push up household spending by a total of about 4.3%. A decrease in real housing wealth comparable to the crash which took place between 2005 and 2009 would lead to a drop of about 3.5%.

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Please Don’t Mess With the Charitable Deduction

WHATEVER else we do about the tax code, we need to save the charitable deduction, which has done so much good in our country and springs directly from some of our deepest values.

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A Man Without a Plan

During the United States’ recent presidential election campaign, public-opinion polls consistently showed that the economy – and especially unemployment – was voters’ number one concern. The Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, sought to capitalize on the issue, asserting: “The president’s plans haven’t worked – he doesn’t have a plan to get the economy going.”

 Nonetheless, Barack Obama was reelected. The outcome may reflect the economy’s slight improvement at election time (as happened when Franklin Roosevelt defeated the Republican Alf Landon in 1936, despite the continuing Great Depression). But Obama’s victory might also be a testament to most US voters’ basic sense of economic reality.

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Businessmen as Presidents: A Historical Circle

WITH so much attention on the income divide between the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent of Americans, it might seem that having enormous business wealth wouldn’t be a great qualification for election as president. And if such a candidate pledged to keep taxes low for the wealthy, he would appear to have no chance at all in a troubled economy.

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