In part, this reflects the issues that I was speaking about a few moments ago; that is, that higher housing prices not only deliver capital gains to the existing owners but also imply a higher price of future housing services.
The reinterpretation of the evidence is that the link between housing wealth and spending arises not so much through the traditional pure wealth channel, but rather because higher housing prices are sometimes a proxy for faster expected income growth into the future. And it is this lift in expected income growth that spending is really responding to.