but it doesn't do that much for the rest of us. Via The Ambrosini Critique, Scott Sumner discovers there was no housing crash:
The BLS claims that housing prices are up 2.1% in the last 12 months....According to the BLS, housing makes up nearly 40% of the core basket of goods and services.
Further reading gets us to the base of the claim: Owner-Equivalent Rents went up 2.7% in the past year. CR was all over this in April and May. Take a gander at this chart--from the CR posting in May:
So while the ratio has gone from 1.4 to 1.1 (which would be more than a 21% decline), almost a whole 10% of that change has been because the base (rent) has gone up. The other 19% of decline doesn't matter for BLS in(de)flation calculation purposes.
No one better tell David Malpass or his investors at Encima Global (motto: "Failing Up is Always an Option"; see the Forbes article link at the left side of the Encima page).
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