Thursday, November 21, 2013

Who bubbled when?


Here we have the housing price index, blue; oil prices, red and consumer inflation green. All units percent change over the month.  Notice the housing bubble collapsed in late 2006.  Meanwhile oil and CPI kept on tracking each other.  What happened? Housing is energy intensive and dropped out first. But it did not cause the recession, the oil shortage caused it.
Yglesias points to a paper that says up to 1/3 of the bubble was due to monetary factors.  Yes, true, but that is not recession causing trouble.  Take housing, the long lead times, the energy intensity (about 25% compared to a consumer where it is 6%), add in the exogenous oil shortage, and general inflation and easily 40% of the price bubble goes back to terms of trade on oil. The question is, after housing what other sector did the oil shortage knock out?

Medical Inflation, because hospitals are the third largest user of energy. Notice the price deflation starting in early 2006? Actually started a few months before the house price deflation.  Likely a result of consolidation of hospitals to reduce expenses.    Basically oil shortages was the ending event for the business cycle.

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