omg. I was not talking about housing but more generally about assets - check my post. for instance stock market is up quite a bit in the past 5-15 years if you did not notice. that forms big portion of household assets. it is true that you can't easily sell your home - after all why would you do it? But you can't ignore the fact that increasing price level increases the value of houses (if only because of tobin's q - google it). So it is an asset - maybe with an haircut. the graph is completely (and likely intentionally) misleading (to start with it does not say if it is in constant dollars or not). if you look at almost any economy worldwide you will see a similar pattern since the fall of iron curtain. we did not have wide use of credit cards combined with internet before... that said it is true that us consumer is a special beast and likely the most leveraged of all. but at the same time he is the richest, rates are still very low and inflation is eroding his paper debt etc. - so it does not look like an idiotic move. anyway - there are may people on ET which are stupid but harmless (like "buy, no risk etc" type of stuff). most of people here know economics only from cnbc (as opposed to university/phd) and never worked on wall street . then there are some that post biased reality in a little bit smarter way - i am on crusade against those
Mostly I find Kudlow to be a perma-bull with an obvious political agenda. However, his call for lower rates is a longtime thing, and has to do with supply-side logic: a greater supply of goods will soak up the extra liquidity, is the idea. We are experiencing this in the real world, you know, with China producing a mountain of goods that, as we all know, has kept the prices of all kinds of things down. So, not something to dismiss out of hand. I do like Santelli a lot, however. He comes across as both extremely intelligent and very street-smart.
I may have been a little harsh, but then again, economists get paid for predicting and analyzing - and they certainly aren't held accountable for the firm's P&L at the end of the day. I will give him this Pabst - he made a successful jump from brokerage to talk show! Gotta like Rick - he calls it like he sees it.