218 posts on "Household Finance"
March 1, 2017
When Debts Compete, Which Wins?
When faced with financial hardship, borrowers might choose to repay some debts while falling behind on others—potentially going into default.
February 16, 2017
Just Released: Total Household Debt Nears 2008 Peak but Debt Picture Looks Much Different
The latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data showed a substantial increase in aggregate household debt balances in the fourth quarter of 2016 and for the year as a whole. As of December 31, 2016, total household debt stood at $12.58 trillion, an increase of $226 billion (or 1.8 percent) from the third quarter of 2016. Total household debt is now just 0.8 percent ($100 billion) below its third quarter 2008 peak of $12.68 trillion, and 12.8 percent above the second quarter 2013 trough. But debt looks very different in 2016 than it did the last time we saw this level of indebtedness.
The Homeownership Gap Is Finally Closing
The homeownership rate peaked at 69 percent in late 2004. By the summer of 2016, it had dropped below 63 percent—exactly where it was when the government started reporting these data back in 1965.
February 15, 2017
Houses as ATMs No Longer
Housing equity is the primary form of collateral that households use for borrowing. This makes it a potentially important source of consumption funding, especially for younger households. In a previous post we showed that owner’s equity in residential real estate has finally, thanks to increasing home prices, rebounded to and essentially re-attained its 2005 peak level. Yet in spite of a gain of more than $7 trillion in housing equity since 2012, so far homeowners haven’t been tapping this equity at anything like the pace we witnessed during the housing boom that ended in 2006. In this post, we analyze the changes in equity withdrawal.
February 14, 2017
The Evolution of Home Equity Ownership
In yesterday’s post, we discussed the extreme swings that household leverage has taken since 2005, using combined loan-to-value (CLTV) ratios for housing as our metric. We also explored the risks that current household leverage presents in the event of a significant downturn in prices. Today we reverse the perspective, and consider housing equity—the value of housing net of all debt for which it serves as collateral. For the majority of households, housing equity is the principal form of wealth, other than human capital, and it thus represents an important form of potential collateral for borrowing. In that sense, housing equity is an opportunity in the same way that housing leverage is a risk. It turns out that aggregate housing equity at the end of 2015 was very close, in nominal terms, to its pre-crisis (2005) level. But housing wealth has moved to a different group of people—made up of people who are older and have higher credit scores than a decade ago. In today’s post, we look at the evolution of housing equity and its owners.
February 13, 2017
How Resilient Is the U.S. Housing Market Now?
Housing is by far the most important asset for most households, and, not coincidentally, housing debt dwarfs other household liabilities. The relationship between housing debt and housing values figures significantly in financial and macroeconomic stability, as events during the housing bust of 2006-12 clearly demonstrated. This week, Liberty Street Economics presents five posts touching on various aspects of housing, from the changing relationship between mortgage debt and housing equity to the future of homeownership. In today’s post, we provide estimates of housing equity and explore how vulnerable households are to declines in house prices, using methods introduced in our paper “Tracking and Stress Testing U.S. Household Leverage.”
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Institutions, Household Finance, Macroeconomics | Permalink | Comments (1)
January 23, 2017
Measuring Americans’ Expectations Following the 2016 Election
While consumer confidence as measured by various surveys has increased sharply since the national election, the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) has shown little notable change in expectations. In this post, we show that the difference may partly reflect systematic compositional changes whereby respondents who answer a survey after the election differ in important ways from those answering the survey before the election—something which the SCE largely avoids. We also show that the flat average aggregate outlook in the SCE masks substantial regional/partisan heterogeneity in shifts in expectations.
November 30, 2016
Just Released: Subprime Auto Debt Grows Despite Rising Delinquencies
The latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data showed a small increase in overall debt in the third quarter of 2016, bolstered by gains in non-housing debt. Mortgage balances continue to grow at a sluggish pace since the recession while auto loan balances are growing steadily.
November 18, 2016
Just Released: Press Briefing on the Survey of Consumer Expectations
The New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) collects information on household heads’ economic expectations and behavior. In particular, the survey covers respondents’ views on how inflation, spending, credit access, and the housing and labor markets will evolve over time. The SCE yields important insights that inform our monetary policy decisions. This morning, President Dudley joined Bank economists to brief the press on the design of the SCE and the latest releases of survey results. President Dudley introduced the briefing by speaking about the benefits of measuring consumers’ expectations.
August 22, 2016
How Do People Revise Their Inflation Expectations?
The New York Fed started releasing results from its Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) three years ago in June 2013. The SCE is a monthly, nationally representative, internet-based survey of a rotating panel of about 1,300 household heads. Its goal, as described in a series of Liberty Street Economics posts, is to collect timely and high-quality information on consumer expectations about a broad range of topics, covering both macroeconomic variables and the household’s own situation. In this post, we look at what drives changes in consumer inflation expectations. Do people respond to changes in recent realized inflation, and to expected and realized changes in prices of salient individual commodities—like gasoline? Understanding what drives inflation expectations is important for the conduct of monetary policy, since it improves a central bank’s ability to assess its own credibility and to evaluate the impact of its policy decisions and communication strategy.
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