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The ticking debt bomb?

Matthew Whittaker

This blog originally appeared on Public Finance

When the financial crisis first hit, politicians of all parties talked up the notion of ‘rebalancing’ the economy, moving away from a growth model dependent on financial services, house price increases and consumption and towards one based on the real economy and on trade. Five years on and, with little sign of a sustained economic recovery, the chancellor appeared to wind the clock back in his last Budget.

The new Help to Buy scheme is designed to give a shot in the arm to the housing market, making it easier for households who are currently considered too risky by lenders to get onto and move up the housing ladder.

Gavin Kelly

This post originally appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog

What role did high levels of household debt play in generating the crash and what do they mean for our economy over the next few years?

Well-worn questions, you might think. And no shortage of people have asserted answers. Following 2008, a whole new crunch-lit genre of books emerged to explore this. There is – or perhaps, was – something of a post-crash orthodoxy that the rise of easy credit, fuelled by run-away rewards for the super rich, and a squeeze elsewhere, encouraged ever greater borrowing.

A favoured narrative, often echoed by the coalition, is that debt ballooned as consumers (and home buyers) went on an irresponsible binge – it was all demand-led. Others argue, particularly in the US, that exploding debt reflects an act of policy – whether explicit or implicit – to increase the supply of easy credit for low and middle income groups who were seeing their wages stagnate. From this perspective, it was less a story of families living beyond their means and more about coping when their means stopped growing.

James Plunkett

This post originally appeared on the OECD blog

How did inequality and household debt interact in the run up to the 2008/09 financial crisis? Today, a new report by NIESR for the Resolution Foundation provides new evidence on that question for the UK. The new analysis confirms the severity of the borrowing situation of low income households in Britain before the crash and raises difficult questions about patterns of consumption in an era of high inequality.

The report’s key contribution is to dig beneath headline figures for household debt to describe the borrowing picture for households at different points in the income distribution. It’s well established that UK household debt, in common with many other countries, ballooned in the late 1990s and 2000s, with the aggregate savings ratio—the percentage of household disposable income that is saved—turning negative in 2008 for the first time since records began. Yet so far these headline figures have been something of a black box.

When rates finally rise, things are set to get nasty

Gavin Kelly

This blog first appeared in the New Statesman.

A good recession followed by a bad recovery. Trite lines like this are often wide of the mark, but this one bears some truth. The fallout of the economic downturn over the last few years – though harsh - was less gruesome than first feared in terms of overall unemployment, bankruptcies and repossessions.