In fact it has been at its highest share of national income since the late 1980s. This change can be seen as a sensible response to an unusually high level of the terms of trade. Something else has also been at work, though, in household behaviour.
Today, practitioners and researchers understand that low-cost information processing, improved creditscoring, and more sophisticated management techniques are rapidly reducing the effective opacity of many small businesses and households. Credit card lending provides an example of this phenomenon.