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Household Debt Reaches $14.15 trillion

February 13, 2020 | 0 min read

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As of February 11, for the 22nd consecutive quarter, debt has reached a new high. According to The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Quarterly Report the “total household debt increased by $193 billion, or 1.4 percent, to reach $14.15 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2019. This makes the total household debt $1.5 trillion higher...than the pre-recession peak of $12.68 trillion, set in the third quarter of 2008.”¹

Mortgages, which are a big part of household debt, increased by $120 billion in the last quarter. But comparatively, the credit quality of these mortgages look good and default on these types of loans remains at a steady low. Additionally, HELOC “saw a $6 billion decline, bringing the outstanding balance to $390 billion and continuing the 10-year downward trend.”2 Furthermore, auto loans increased by $16 billion and outstanding student loans were at $1.51 trillion, which is an increase of $10 billion from last quarter. Credit cards also saw a significant increase of 96 billion.²

However, despite the increase in household debt, aggregate delinquency rates have remained mostly the same. “As of December 31, 4.7% of outstanding debt was in some stage of delinquency, a 0.1 percentage point decrease from the third quarter.”²

Although debt is steadily on the rise, the economy is stable with the quality of loan borrowers seemingly healthy. A big part of that, one might argue, is due to the strength in employment numbers. Today, unemployment is the lowest it's been in decades.

How MX Can Help

At MX, we create products and solutions that enable financial institutions to really know their customers, so they can help them make better financial decisions. Really knowing your customers with the right tools and the use of clean data enables you to create competitive product offers. Our tools make it easy to leverage the most advanced analytics to discover key insights that help you truly understand, engage with, and build meaningful relationships with your customers.

1 https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc

2 https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data/pdf/hhdc_2019q4.pdf

Tags:

consumer behavior

household debt

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