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Sunday Telegraph: £1,300,000,000,000 in debt

The day of reckoning has come for a debt-soaked society that has seen outstanding household loans double to £1.3 trillion in just seven years.

In a deliberate new policy of blunt-speaking, the governor eschewed the normally equivocal language of central bankers to warn that if we don't change our free-spending ways, he will - by pushing up interest rates until the growing threat of inflation is eliminated.

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"It wasn't what he said; it was who was saying it," says Ray Boulger, a mortgage broker. City economists expect the response to come by August, increasing interest rates from 5.5 to 5.75 per cent. But the real fear is that this will not be enough and that 6 per cent interest rates will be with us by the autumn.

This could make for a rocky Christmas, not just for homeowners but also shops and manufacturers reliant on easy credit to fuel consumer spending. Property experts fear the housing market may not be able to cope

"A quarter point rise is as much as the market can take. Anything more will precipitate a serious crash," says Robert Bryant-Pearson, of Allied Surveyors, the largest independent property valuer. "Everyone seems to forget what happened between 1990 and 1993: the repossessions, the negative equity. The problem now is that people's borrowing in relation to their income is extremely high."



You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Jun 17th, 2007 at 03:55:37 AM EST
[ Parent ]


In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sun Jun 17th, 2007 at 05:15:30 AM EST
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Frightening!

And Japan has possibly the greatest challenge in land resource use. WTF?

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Jun 17th, 2007 at 09:28:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]
And yet MSM and economists talk only about the government debt, but all three kind of debts are substitute, so reducing one's debt is usually just accounting:

http://guerby.org/blog/index.php/2006/11/02/123-les-dettes

In France, household debt was 44.7% of GDP and USA one was 92.9% in 2006. And contrary to government and business debt, household debt cannot be "rolled" and has to be paid during one's lifetime.

by Laurent GUERBY on Sun Jun 17th, 2007 at 05:20:27 AM EST
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