The danger is that enterprises which are in fact insolvent continue to receive credit and therefore do not disappear from the market, whilst the growth of healthy companies is stunted. We also talk about zombie firms and evergreen lending in this regard. But savers are also amongst the casualties of the low-interest-rate setting.
Household debt is low by international standards, and is concentrated among those with a greater debt repayment capacity; at the end of 2019, it was less than 62 per cent of their disposable income, against 95 per cent for the euro area on average (with a peak of over 200 per cent in the Netherlands), 96 per cent in the United States, and 124 per cent in the United Kingdom.