Dahinter steckt offenbar System: Dickere Portfolio sollen den US-Konsumenten zu mehr Konsum verleiten, da er ja nun "reich" ist. Das hat sich der Goldman-Sachs-Finanzminster aber hübsch ausgedacht...
Stock Gains Beating Home Losses
By Tony Crescenzi
Street.com Contributor
4/20/2007 2:18 PM EDT
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The U.S. stock market has obviously done well of late, and its gains are combining with low bond yields, tight credit spreads and the weakened dollar to provide meaningful financial stimulus to the U.S. economy.
We can quantify the impact of some of these; for example, studies have shown that for each percentage-point drop in the value of the U.S. dollar, the benefit to the U.S. economy is the equivalent to a roughly 10-basis-point cut in the Fed funds rate. [AHA! - A.L.] What the real number is we can't know, but suffice it to say that the weakened dollar will boost exports.
As for the stock market's gains, use the 4-cent rule. For each dollar gained in the value of equity portfolios, consumer spending should be expected to see an additional 4-cent increase.
This means that with U.S. equities currently valued around $20 trillion, a 5% increase in equities prices would boost portfolio values by about $1 trillion, which would theoretically boost consumer spending by $40 billion, generally over the course of about 18 months. Incidentally, households hold about $20 trillion of real estate.
There is a caveat to this. Equal gains in equities and home values are still a net negative. Home values have probably fallen as much as 5% recently, which means that values may have fallen by about $1 trillion. The wealth effect of that would be much greater than for a $1 trillion gain in equities. This makes sense since households tend to extract more of their home gains than their equities gains, chiefly through sales, refinancings and home equity loans.
Luckily in this instance, however, households can return to their financial assets, which they have traditionally turned to when home equity withdrawals were a lesser alternative. In other words, declines in home equity withdrawals should not be viewed in isolation; it is not a dollar-for-dollar hit to the economy.
For decades, there has been a seesaw pattern of withdrawals from either home assets or financial assets. In the current situation, households will merely turn back to their financial assets to finance consumption. Recent data from the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds report show that this is already happening.
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