Excerpted from MATTHEW BOESLER, who discusses a ConvergEx broker report:

“The potential impacts of renting/leasing as a long-term trend, though, are worrisome: Renting and sharing could lead to lower home sales (and, subsequently lower home values and net worths), as well as lower auto and retail sales,” write the strategists. “The ripple effects could also be catastrophic: Adjusting to a consumer who does not necessarily buy, but rather rents, would necessitate a shift in production, sales, and even employment structures. Everything interesting in economics happens at the margin, so if the nth consumer chooses to rent an apartment instead of buying a house or making do with a car-share program instead of purchasing a new vehicle, then demand for new houses and cars drops.”

For the ConvergEx team, even more worrying than the rise of renting and sharing at the expense of ownership are the underlying reasons driving consumers to rent and share more.

“The crisis-sparked renting and sharing economy could have an effect similar to that of the Depression, in which the consumer psyche is morphed to constantly imagine a worst-case-scenario,” they write. “The recent recession, arguably, could be fostering a generation of ‘renters’ and ‘sharers’ (as opposed to ‘savers’) who are wary of potentially risky investment vehicles or financial instruments. Recent urbanization trends in the U.S. population could be the first signal of this: Cities are the hubs of the renting and sharing economy, after all.”

That’s why the behavior of the Millennials — the generation often parametrized as having been born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, will be key to watch.”