Tuesday, May 14, 2019

I'll be using higher "debt service" numbers from now on

Alan Greenspan, in Testimony before Congress, February 19 1992 (PDF)
From page -10- (or 11 of 17)
In part because we have seen declines in long- as well as short-term rates and increases in equity prices, progress has been made in balance sheet restructuring, and hopefully more is in train. As a result of lower interest rates, household debt service as a percent of disposable personal income has fallen in the past year, from about 19-1/2 to about 18-1/2 percent.
Whoa! Debt service fell from 19.5% to 18.5% of DPI? The numbers I look at are around 10%, maybe 12%. Here are the four Household Debt Service and Financial Obligations Ratios series that FRED offers. I've always used the blue one, third from the bottom (the one in the neighborhood of 10 or 12 percent).

To the FRED graph I added a line running from 19.5% in January of 1991 to 18.5% in January of 1992, an approximation of the fall in debt service that Greenspan described:

The Four FRED Series, and Greenspan's Estimate
Even the "Household Financial Obligations" series is low, relative to Greenspan's numbers.

1 comment:

The Arthurian said...

See also mine of 4 July 2016, and Jim's comment there:

http://newarthurianeconomics.blogspot.com/2016/07/something-old-something-new-something.html