No good answers

In On household debt at the FRED Blog, for household debt they use "consumer credit" plus "home mortgages" as a measure of household debt. I always use CMDEBT. What's the difference?

Graph #1: Blue is CMDEBT. Red is what the FRED Blog used.

Ooh, that's a fair amount. I was expecting to say "not much" but it is more than I thought. It varies, but my number is in the neighborhood of 9 or 10 percent higher than their number:

Graph #2 (This graph also shows more years.)

Maybe I should be using the FRED Blog number.

//

I wonder what the difference is. Just the nonprofit organizations? If it was some other household debt, the FRED Blog graph should have included it. So, maybe yeah. That's not a very good answer. But that's all I got.

//

Suppose we look at related things. Interest paid:

Graph #3

These are close. This, I've looked at before. Here's the ratio:

Graph #4

This one varies, too. But the interest paid by nonprofits is generally in the neighborhood of 2 or 3 percent of the amount of interest paid by households. Not 9 or 10 percent.

If our assumptions so far are good, then nonprofits borrow about 9 or 10% as much as households borrow, but pay only about 2 or 3% as much interest. That's odd. Do you suppose households on average pay interest rates that are four or five times as high as those paid by nonprofits? That doesn't seem right. Makes me think that the 9 or 10 percent difference we found is maybe only in part the debt of nonprofits, and in part also the debt of households. Not all of it nonprofit debt. But I still don't know.

The information should emerge from the numbers, but in this case it does not.

Suppose we look at effective interest rates: Monetary interest paid, relative to debt owed. Debt for households, using household debt as figured in the FRED Blog post. Debt for households plus nonprofits, using CMDEBT. And if we assume the 9 or 10 percent difference between CMDEBT and the other is the debt of nonprofits -- an assumption I do not trust -- then we can see the effective interest rate paid by nonprofits, too.

Blue for Households, red for Households and Nonprofits, and green for Nonprofits:

Graph #5

FRED has two different series for monetary interest paid: government: federal. There are also two basic versions of the Federal debt: the gross debt, and the one that excludes debt the government owes to itself. Using the lower measure of interest paid and the higher measure of Federal debt gives me the lowest measure I can get for the effective rate of interest paid on the Federal debt. That's the dotted line on the graph above.

Federal interest rates are low, compared to other rates. I've heard it many times. So it doesn't surprise me that the dotted line is lower than the red and blue.

It doesn't surprise me either, really, that the green line is lower than the dotted line. I take it to mean that the green line is wrong. The green line is too low. Either the interest paid by nonprofits is wrong, or the number I used for the debt of nonprofits is wrong.

The latter, obviously.

So here we are at the end of this episode, and all we know is that I still don't know about the debt of nonprofits.

And that means I still don't know about the debt of households.