I am talking about stock market money....not appreciation in a house.
A lot of the reason the stock market went up is because US consumers made large equity withdrawls from their houses (as a result of the housing bubble) and supported the US economy, driving up earnings and therefore stock prices. Now that that particular ATM has dried up, people aren’t buying plasma TVs and SUVs with quite the same abandon. You can lay both the bubble and the bust on Greenspan’s feet.