¹In addition to any direct causation from an unanticipated change in wealth to resulting changes in consumption, our measured ‘effects’ likely capture the influence of other economic circumstances that are correlated with the lagged changes in wealth. For example, an increase in credit availability might allow the bidding-up of asset prices as well as a faster-than-normal increase in spending. The chief argument for the simplistic approach we adopt here, in which all such influences are combined, is that we are not persuaded that there is a reliable method to disentangle the various plausible influences. Our view is that a simple summary of past history of the kind embodied in our estimates may be more useful and less fragile than a more ambitious approach which would attempt to decompose the ‘effect’ into more primitive sources.