Although most of the literature on the credit channel focuses on spending by business firms,the credit channel should apply equally as well to consumer spending,particularly on consumer durables and housing.Declines in bank lending induced by a monetary contraction should cause a decline in durables and housing purchases by consumers who do not have access to other sources of credit.Similarly,increases in interest rates cause a deterioration in household balance-sheets because consumers'cash flow is adversely affected.
Another way of looking at how the balance-sheet channel may operate through consumers is to consider liquidity effects on consumer durable and housing expenditure--found to have been important factors during the Great Depression (Mishkin(1978)).In the liquidity-effects view,balance-sheet effects work through their impact on consumers'desire to spend rather than on lenders' desire to lend. Because of asymmetric information about their quality,consumer durables and housing are very illiquid assets.If as a result of a bad income shock consumers needed to sell their consumer durables or housing to raise money , they would expect a big loss because they could not get the full value of these assets in a distress sale.(This is just a manifestation of the “lemons problem” described by Akerloff (1970) Which helped stimulate research on the credit channel.)In contrast,if consumers held financial assets (such as money in the bank, stocks, or bonds), they could easily sell them quickly for their full market value and raise the cash. Hence, if consumers expect a higher likelihood of finding themselves in financial distress, they would rather be holding fewer illiquid consumer durable or housing assets and more liquid financial assets.
A consumer’s balance sheet should be an important influence on his or her estimate of the likelihood of suffering financial distress. Specifically , when consumers have a large amount of financial assets relative to their debts, their estimate of the probability of financial distress is low, and they will be more willing to purchase consumer durables or housing. When stock prices raise, the value of financial assets rises as well; consumer durable expenditure will also rise because consumers have a more secure financial position and a lower estimate of the likelihood of suffering financial distress. This leads to another transmission mechanism for monetary policy operating through the link between money and equity prices: