U.S. household wealth suffers record drop in second quarter

reuters.com

34 points·almog··11 comments

It is problematic that household wealth is stored in housing, creating bad incentive that exabacate inequality and accelerating climate change and just making us a poorer society.

Seems to be a different issue than what's being discussed here?

Housing prices didn't fall last quarter.

Someone just had a soapbox moment.

Anyway, from my personal experience, my personal wealth rate of change was definitely negatively affected by the housing market, due to increase in valuations, which turned into a significant increase in real estate taxes.

I live in one of those places (Austin) where my house valuation jumped by 120% YoY.

can you share your logic?

claims that housing being valuable leads to "bad incentives", bigger inequality, and overall poorer society aren't obviously true to me.

Why is inequality bad and more importantly, what levels of inequality are acceptable? What is the objective standard here and what are the criteria/reasons that justify that standard?

Its bad for the ~third of households that don't own housing. But from classic wealth distribution metrics, I suspect it's overall a good thing for inequality (because so many people own their own houses).

It’s the effect of the stock market losses. From the article:

“…a bear market in stocks far outweighed further gains in real estate values, a Federal Reserve report showed on Friday.

Title's a bit overwrought.

"tumbled to $143.8 trillion at the end of June from $149.9 trillion"

Wealth destruction will lead to demand destruction which should lead to earnings contraction.

And lower inflation

I wonder how quickly prices of goods will follow, they sure went up quickly on the way up.

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