13 Although the median share of gross income needed to service the debt of highly indebted households has fallen notably over the past decade from 43 per cent of gross income to 34 per cent, largely as a result of much lower interest rates, the liquid financial buffers held by this group remain relatively modest, roughly equivalent to only 6.5 months of current debt servicing.
An intriguing aspect of the recent wave of productivity acceleration is that US businesses and workers appear to have benefited more from the recent advances in information technology than their counterparts in Europe or Japan. Those countries, of course, have also participated in this wave of invention and innovation, but they appear to have been slower to exploit it.