Even under these extreme assumptions, even though bad debts rise markedly and there would be a lot of personal distress, it is very hard to conclude that there would be large-scale financial failure. Conclusions Although I started with the intention of keeping my talk simple, I am afraid that the subject matter ended up being far more technical than I thought.
I will therefore attempt to compensate for this by keeping the conclusions as simple as possible. There is one important factor that should give us some reassurance about the large increase in household debt. That is, most of the increase was due to the halving in the mortgage rate and the inflation rate as we moved from the 1980s to the 1990s.