The 2008 U.S. financial upheaval raises important questions about the sources of household consumption and debt growth, along with their macroeconomic effects. We argue that spending and financial preferences evolve as social norms interact with both cultural trends and institutional changes in household finance. We identify historical forces that raised consumption and debt over the past quarter century and interpret these events with Hyman Minsky's financial cycle framework. Strong consumption helped moderate recessions and boost growth since the mid 1980s. But unprecedented household debt has now culminated in a financial crisis that threatens to cause a deep recession.
Rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95 percent of the US personal income distribution beginning about 1980. To maintain stable debt to income, this group's consumption-income ratio needed to decline, which did not happen through 2006, and its debt-income ratio rose dramatically, unlike the ratio for the top 5 percent. In the Great Recession, the consumption-income ratio for the bottom 95 percent did finally decline, consistent with tighter borrowing constraints, while the top 5 percent ratio rose, consistent with consumption smoothing. We argue that higher inequality and the associated demand drag helps explain the slow recovery.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.