Taking stock of the recent good news from the housing market, Jared Berstein warns not to expect too much of a boost to economic growth from rising sales and prices. He writes (in his headline) that housing was a huge headwind, and now it's a small tailwind, and adds: "don’t expect the kind of growth effects from the sector we had in the boom–it was a bubble, and who’d want to go through that again?"

He also presents this chart from Goldman Sachs, illustrating to the Gross Domestic Product impact of housing over the past few years:

Dean Baker has previously explained why we shouldn't expect more than a modest boost from housing in the near future. Basically, we don't want to return to the highs of the bubble. Returning to a merely normal housing market won't come close to filling the shortfall of demand for goods and services.