The personal debt time bomb

“Britain’s supposed economic recovery rests on a personal debt timebomb.” I’m sure you have read about this many times. If it often accompanied by the prediction that it will all end in tears at some point, just like it did last time. Now I do not want to flip to the other extreme and suggest everything is hunky dory. For example the UK’s high personal debt levels are in large part because of very high house prices, and high house prices are a real problem for many reasons. But I do want to suggest that the evidence for doom and gloom is not as clearcut as some suggest.

The first, and perhaps most basic, misapprehension is that the financial crisis was the result of UK defaults. It was not. UK banks got into difficulties because of their lending overseas. I discuss this in the context of the so called 2007 boom here. In particular I note that, as the Bank’s Ben Broadbent points out, in the Great Recession UK “losses on most domestic loans have actually been unexceptional. Instead, it is UK banks’ substantial overseas assets that caused much of the damage.” Northern Rock failed because its business model, which relied on it obtaining funds from the wholesale market, failed. Of course for UK banks, this misapprehension that the financial crisis was a result of foolish UK borrowers rather than their lending behaviour may be rather convenient.

A second common trait is to quote numbers for debt in nominal terms. Like cinema box office receipts, we are always breaking records. It is a classic example of the kind of bad practice I note here. This chart, from the Bank of England’s latest inflation report, shows the ratio of average household debt to income.

It is certainly true that this rose substantially in the years before the financial crisis. A good deal, but not all, of that is down to rising UK house prices, which means there are assets behind that debt. That is a concern, as I have already noted, but as I have also noted it did not cause the UK financial crisis. We are a long way from those peak levels, and this chart shows that the household sector as a whole has not gone on a borrowing binge over the last year or two.

This has a political dimension. It would be foolish for those on the left to predict that Osborne’s recovery was bound to fail by 2020. It might, but if I had to put my money on any outcome it would be more optimistic. The small number who suggested in 2012/13 that UK recovery would never come with Osborne’s fiscal regime were used to discredit all those who were against austerity. It would be far better to focus relentlessly on housing, and how a whole generation are being denied the possibility of home ownership without helpful and wealthy parents.  

Apprenticeships and Conservative Governments

The UK budget included the creation of an employer levy to help finance a large increase in apprenticeships. It is a key part of this government’s belated attempts to deal with poor productivity growth, although lack of workforce skills has been a UK problem for as long as I can remember. I hope the goals are achieved, but this is not my area so I cannot comment on whether they will be. Instead let me tell an anecdote, and reference two good sources.

After I left H.M.Treasury, I found myself in a forum discussing Mrs. Thatcher’s economic policies. The person defending the government was a Treasury economist that I had worked for, and who was no fool. Most of the questions raised were macro, so I had no problem making critical comments. But then a question on apprenticeships came up. In the 1970s there was an apprenticeship levy covering most of British industry, administered by tripartite bodies. The Thatcher government had just begun dismantling that levy.

As this was hardly my field, I feared I would have nothing to contribute. But all my former colleague could say to defend the government’s dismantling of the levy system was that the government believed that individual employers were far better placed to do their own training. I could not believe what I was hearing. Even with the little microeconomics I had, I could see the flaw in that argument. Training employees with non-firm specific skills involved an obvious problem for the employer - the employee can be tempted to move to another firm, and the original firm gets nothing back from their investment. Firms that did pay for apprenticeships would always be vulnerable to others that attempted to free ride and poach their skilled labour.

Yet this ‘why should governments interfere’ mantra was the only justification the government could find for getting rid of the levy. Mrs Thatcher’s policies might have improved UK productivity growth for some reasons, but this was not one of them. As I often say, a neoliberal agenda (or whatever else you want to call it) is anathema to economics, a large part of which is about market imperfections, and how governments can sometimes be instrumental in fixing them. (Not always, as perhaps the German approach to apprenticeships illustrates.)

Two good recent pieces on apprenticeships are this short piece from Hilary Steedman, and something more detailed from Alison Wolf.