Tag Archives: private debt

Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. That point inevitably arrives on the liabilities side of the economy’s balance sheet. But what of the asset side? One person’s debt is a creditor’s claim for payment. This is defined as “savings,” even though banks simply create credit endogenously on their own computers without needing any prior savings. When debts can’t be paid and debtors default, what happens to these creditors?  Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of...

On July 26, 2018, UK Guardian columnist Phillip Inman published an article – Household debt in UK ‘worse than at any time on record’ – which reported on the latest figures at the time from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). He noted that the data showed that “British households spent around £900 more on average than they received in income during 2017, pushing their finances into deficit for the first time since the credit boom of the 1980s … The figures pose a challenge to the...

This dramatic rise is most likely caused by austerity and the government’s reduction of the deficit, though the post referendum stagnating wages and rise in inflation has also spurred on the level of debt. The relation with public and private debt is one that is of increasing interest to Post-Keynesian economists especially those who put their faith in Modern Monetary Theory. MMT would suggest the dropping government deficit is pushing the rest of us into deficit but the way the government...

This article is a continuation of previous comments on financial crises, with two lines of discussion. The first is a bit of a primer, explaining why I and other commentators associate financial crises with a buildup of private debt. The second part discusses the main problem with associating crises with private debt buildups: growth in debt stocks is by itself not enough to trigger a crisis. The catch is a variant of the efficient markets hypothesis: if we could easily forecast crises, it...

From earlier private debt crisis 10 years ago - President Bush welcomes then Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey to the G20 Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy, Nov. 15 2008, Washington D.C. White House photo by Chris Greenberg. This article first appeared in the Indian Journal the Economic...

The media has been giving a lot of attention in the last week to the 10-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers crash which occurred on September 15, 2008 and marked the realisation, after months of denial, that there was a financial crisis underway. Lots of articles have been published recently about what we have learned from this historical episode. I thought that the Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi (September 13, 2018) – Ten Years After the Crash, We’ve Learned Nothing – pretty much...

After the BRICs came the MINTs – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey.In a series of January 2014 BBC programmes, Jim O’Neill – then the Goldman Sachs economist who had coined the term BRICs – celebrated the new acronym. On a blog under the title ‘The Mint countries: Next economic giants?’ he raved about the potential of his...

Last Friday July 27, 2018), the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published their latest national accounts data – Gross Domestic Product: Second Quarter 2018 (Advance Estimate), which tells us that the annualised real GDP growth rate for the US was a very strong 4.1 per cent in the was 3 per cent in the June-quarter 2018. Note this is not the annual growth over the last four-quarters, which is a more modest 2.8 per cent (up from 2.6 per cent in the previous quarter). As this is only the...

In previous articles (example), I have been arguing that investment is the major driver of the private sector cycles. (I am using the national accounting definition of investment, and not the act of purchasing financial securities.) We can now turn to the data, and the important question: how are we doing right now?… There are a number of categories of expenditures that are all lumped under the notion of investment. The major categories of interest are: Investment by government (which is...

Mountains of private debt?  Image with acknowledgment to Wikimedia “Countries that underwent sharp credit booms have often experienced a crisis” (Bank of England, 2018, Chart A.28 p. 22)For policymakers, the importance of private debt was the key take home from the financial crisis. Though why it...