Correspondingly, by 2007 the share of current income devoted to servicing that debt had risen from 7 per cent to 12 per cent, despite interest rates in 2007 being below those in 1995. It is still not generally appreciated how striking these trends were.
I cannot say that it is unprecedented for spending to grow consistently faster than income, because it had already been doing that for the 20 years prior to 1995. That is, the saving rate had been on a long-term downward trend since the mid-1970s.