Domestic Non-Financial Debt and its kissing cousins

Thomas Palley writes about debt relative to GDP in his PDF, Financialization revisited: the economics and political economy of the vampire squid economy. He refers to "Domestic non-financial sector" debt in Table 1, and to "domestic non-financial debt" in the text, both on page 31.

 

A search at FRED for domestic non-financial debt turns up, among other things, two quarterly series bearing the title "Domestic Nonfinancial Sectors; Debt Securities and Loans; Liability, Level":

• TODNS which is seasonally adjusted, and 
• TCMDODNS, which is not seasonally adjusted.

The debt I usually use is TCMDO (All Sectors Debt), which is not seasonally adjusted. So here I will use the "not seasonally adjusted" version of Domestic Non-Financial debt.

 

The components of All Sectors debt (TCMDO) are

• Domestic Non-Financial debt (TCMDODNS)
• Domestic Financial debt (TCMDODFS), and
• Rest of the World debt (WCMITCMFODNS)

"Rest of the world" debt is small, by the way: usually near 3% of All Sectors debt. Since 2008, however, it has doubled.

Where I use the word "debt" FRED pretty consistently uses "debt securities and loans" in the titles of data series. Sometimes, however, they seem to use "credit" and "debt" interchangeably. For example, when I started using FRED, the title of the TCMDO series was "Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding". Today, the title of that series is "All Sectors; Debt Securities and Loans; Liability, Level". But it is still listed under "L.1 Credit Market Debt Outstanding".

Many of these debt series titles say "Liability". I take this to mean, for example, that the "Rest of the World" series tells how much debt is owed to creditors in the US by the rest of the world, and not what we owe to the rest of the world. 

One of the other data series I'm looking at just now (QUSPAMUSDA) bears this note:

Credit is provided by domestic banks, all other sectors of the economy and non-residents. The "private non-financial sector" includes non-financial corporations (both private-owned and public-owned), households and non-profit institutions serving households as defined in the System of National Accounts 2008. The series have quarterly frequency and capture the outstanding amount of credit at the end of the reference quarter. In terms of financial instruments, credit covers loans and debt securities.

Little tidbits like that turn out to be quite useful sometimes. Usually though, for me it turns out like Oh, I read something about that, somewhere...

The components of Domestic Non-Financial debt are

• Household debt (TCMILBSHNO)
  
• Non-Financial Business debt (TBSDODNS)
  
• Federal Government debt (FGTCMDODNS)
  
• State and Local debt (SLGTCMDODNS)
  

The components of the Non-Financial Business component are

• Nonfinancial Noncorporate Business debt (TCMILBSNNB)
  
• Nonfinancial Corporate Business debt (TCMILBSNNCB)
  

 

Start with Domestic Non-Financial debt. Subtract the Federal Government component, and the State and Local Governments component. You are left with Total Credit to Private Non-Financial Sector (QUSPAMUSDA). Something that should be true actually turns out to be true.

But you never know.