• @MicroWaveOP
    link
    41 year ago

    The past 15 years have also witnessed a decline in the amount of money Americans must set aside to service their debt. The household debt servicing ratio has fallen steadily from 13.2% of disposable income in 2007 to 9.6% at the end of the first quarter of 2023. While falling interest rates have been important to that outcome, they only account for part of the decline in debt-servicing costs. To wit, as the Fed raised rates by five percentage points over the past 18 months, household debt-servicing costs only rose by 1.5 percentage points of disposable income. That is considerably less than would have been the case if the total stock of debt were at pre-2008 levels and if the fraction of adjustable-rate borrowings had not fallen sharply oversince.