A look at the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for 2025:Q2 from the New York Fed, focusing on the landscape of the current mortgage market.| Liberty Street Economics
Philippe Bracke, Matt Everitt, Martina Fazio and Alexandra Varadi The Bank of England Agenda for Research (BEAR) sets the key areas for new research at the Bank over the coming years. This post is an example of issues considered under the Macroeconomic Environment Theme which focuses on the changing inflation dynamics and unfolding structural change … Continue reading When mortgage flexibility meets monetary policy tightening: heterogeneous impacts on spending and debt→| Bank Underground
The financial sector in the U.S. economy is deeply interconnected. In our previous post, we showed that incorporating information about this network of financial claims leads to a substantial reassessment of which financial sectors are ultimately financing the lending to the real sector as a whole (households plus nonfinancial firms). In this post, we delve deeper into the differences between the composition of lending to households and nonfinancial firms in terms of direct lending as well as...| Liberty Street Economics
Debt balances continued to rise at a moderate pace in the fourth quarter of 2024, and delinquencies, particularly for auto loans and credit cards, remained elevated, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. Auto loan balances have grown steadily since 2011, expanding by $48 billion in 2024. This increase reflects a steady inflow of newly originated auto loan balances, which in 2024 were boosted primarily b...| Liberty Street Economics
Based on recent proposals and policy dialogue, it would appear that first-time home buyers (FTB) are indeed facing desperate times. For example, in a recent Urban Institute study, Michael Stegman, Ted Tozer, and Richard Green advocate for a zero-downpayment Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage. They argue that this would be a more efficient way to deliver much needed support to help households transition to homeownership given the challenges of high house prices and mortgage rates.| Liberty Street Economics
Disparities in wealth are pronounced across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. As part of an ongoing series on inequality and equitable growth, we have been documenting the evolution of these gaps between Black, Hispanic, and white households, in this case from the first quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2023 for a variety of assets and liabilities for a pandemic-era picture. We find that real wealth grew and that the pace of growth for Black, Hispanic, and white households...| Liberty Street Economics
One criticism of overdraft credit is that the fees seem borne disproportionately by low-income, Black, and Hispanic households. To investigate this concern, we surveyed around 1,000 households about their overdraft activity. Like critics, we find that these groups do tend to overdraft more often. However, when we control for respondents’ credit scores along with their socioeconomic characteristics, we discover that only their credit score predicts overdraft activity. While it’s not altog...| Liberty Street Economics
A look at shifts in households’ public policy expectations following the 2024 presidential election.| Liberty Street Economics
A look at why U.S. credit card rates are so high.| Liberty Street Economics
A look at how the post-pandemic return of negative reporting of past due balances will impact the credit scores of student loan borrowers.| Liberty Street Economics
A look at how the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent policy responses disrupted long-term trends underlying U.S. student loans.| Liberty Street Economics
A look at the delinquency patterns of households with multiple debts and which debts they prioritize repaying.| Liberty Street Economics
High prices and rising debt put pressure on household budgets this year: A look at the New York Fed’s top five Liberty Street Economics blog posts of 2024.| Liberty Street Economics
A granular look at the U.S. debt-to-income ratio over time, broken down by loan type.| Liberty Street Economics
Mortgage balances, the largest component of U.S. household debt, grew by only $77 billion (0.6 percent) in the second quarter of 2024, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. This modest increase reflects a substantial slowdown in mortgage origination; only $374 billion was originated during the second quarter, compared to an average of about $1 trillion per quarter between 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile, after n...| Liberty Street Economics
A look at credit card borrowers using 90 percent or more of their credit limit and how likely they are to miss credit card payments.| Liberty Street Economics
Disparities in wealth distribution by age have slightly narrowed since the beginning of the pandemic. This change was likely driven by expanded ownership of financial assets among younger Americans.| Liberty Street Economics
In this post, the authors revisit their analysis on credit cards and examine which borrowers are struggling with their auto loan payments.| Liberty Street Economics