Despite incessant pundit parroting of the "deleveraging households" meme, America is and probably always will be, addicted to debt. If you need proof, have a look at the latest statistics on non-mortgage debt, which, thanks to America’s twin trillion-dollar bubbles, recently soared to its highest level in a decade. To wit, from HousingWire, citing Black Knight Financial:
What we’ve found is that mortgage holders today are carrying more non-mortgage debt than at any point in the past 10 years, with an average of $25,000 per borrower. That’s $1,400 more on average than one year ago, and nearly $2,600 more than in 2011. The primary driver of this increase is a rise in auto-related debt, which accounted for 81% of the overall non-mortgage debt increase over the past four years [and] student loan debt [which] is at all-time high.
Now, Pew is out with a new study entitled "The Complex Story Of American Debt" and as you might have imagined, the non-profit found that the past three decades have witnessed an unprecedented shift in Americans’ propensity to leverage household balance sheets. This tendency has not been accompanied by a concurrent and proportional increase in household income. Here is the story of America’s debt addiction in six graphics:
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