There have been a number of historical records broken and economic oddities that have taken place during this COVID-19 crisis, with regard to both the consumer and businesses. We discussed one of these oddities a couple weeks ago, the decline in consumer spending on service. Consumer spending has historically been highly noncyclical, in large part because a good chunk (25%) of consumer service consumption is healthcare spending, which often cannot be put off for very long, recession or no recession.
In this Economics Weekly, we examine an area of the economy that has held up surprisingly well during this crisis, the U.S. residential housing market.
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Richard de Chazal, CFA is a London-based macroeconomist covering the U.S. economy and financial markets.