After 11 consecutive years with household outlays exceeding disposable income, household debt burdens have increased  1  The Bank of Canada, together with the federal government, also provided exceptional liquidity to the financial system so that our sound banks could replace the short-term liquidity and wholesale funding that had dried up in the immediate aftermath of the failure of Lehman Brothers.
2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  substantially. Household debt as a percentage of disposable income has risen by almost 60 percentage points to 165 per cent today, 2 and Canadians are now more indebted than the Americans or the British (Chart 7).