There are various macroeconomic theories that claim recessions are caused by changes in debt. These theories make intuitive sense. For example, in Minsky‘s version, investors get overly speculative during periods of economic stability and take greater and greater risk in lending (investing) their money which fuels speculative financial bubbles. When the bubbles pop, the investors stop lending their money and the debtors must pay it back. This causes a balance-sheet recession in which most people have greater debts than assets (on their ‘balance sheet’) and so they must spend less to pay back their debts. This is also sometimes known as the debt deflation theory of recession. In the debt deflation theory of recession, people try to deflate (or reduce) their debts which causes price deflation as the aggregate demand for goods and services falls.
Similarly, as John Cassidy says in his book, How Markets Fail, the housing bubble was caused by an explosion of debt in the US. From 2002 to 2006, total debt outstanding increased 42%! “The increase in debt amounted to about $43,000 for every person in the country, including children and senior citizens.” (p.223) But that also means that someone else was lending that much money to the debtors, so the net debt did not change.
The paradox of debt is that net debt is always zero for a group in total. One person’s debt is always equal to another person’s asset. So the total net debt of the world is always exactly zero. The US can borrow money from foreigners, but net US foreign debt is fairly modest because Americans also lend a lot of money to foreigners. Most US borrowers get their money from US lenders. From this perspective, there can never be a general increase in debt. It is always zero! But then how do we get measurements like the following graph?
I have no idea! Unfortunately, I have never seen a good explanation of what this is measuring. The only way there can be an increase in debt is if we only focus on the debts of one particular group while ignoring the increased assets of the lenders. But this is completely arbitrary and the classes of debts that are counted (and assets that are ignored) may change over time which could explain most of the apparent variation in the graph. We need a better measure of debt and I propose that median household net debt is likely to be a good one. This measure makes it clear what group is being ignored–everyone but the median household. And because the wealthy are the primary net savers in every country, and the middle class is the primary borrower, the median net debt could be a much more useful macroeconomic indicator than the data in the above graph which does nothing to explain 90% of the recessions that are shaded on the graph.
The main explanation for recessions is all about the distribution of financial resources. In a recession, there is a reduction in the amount that people want to spend, and this causes excess savings that have nowhere to go. But most people near the median income or below do not have excess savings. Most people have less savings than they feel that they need and they try to save more (or payoff debt which is tantamount to saving). When everyone tries to increase savings at the same time, it can only result in more hoarding, and that causes a recession.
Every dollar saved represents a debt that someone else owes. When someone gives you goods or services in exchange for your savings, they are paying society’s debt to you. Although some savings is hoarded, most savings is loaned out again (as debt) to someone else. Because savings are incredibly unequally distributed, that means that only a fairly small number of wealthy elites can have net financial savings. Most people have net financial debts. Many people also have physical assets (like housing or a share of a business) that could be sold to pay off their financial debts, but if we only look at the distribution of claims over financial assets rather than real assets, the vast majority of people in every society are financial debtors who owe a few wealthy elites.
Whereas everyone in the world could have an equal share of real assets like land, a financial asset is only created by creating debt and so financial assets can never be equally distributed. Someone has to owe someone else.
A better measure of debt would explicitly address the distribution of debt. Median debt/GDP is one such measure, but nobody will really know exactly how useful it is until we start collecting the data. It could be important because, as Robert Schiller says, inequality leads to debt which could contribute to economic crisis:
A 2015 study published in The American Economic Review by Michael Kumhof of the Bank of England, Romain Rancière of the International Monetary Fund and Pablo Winant of the Bank of England found that both the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007-9 had their origins, in part, in rising inequality.
Both were accompanied by increases in borrowing by low- to middle-income people, who tried to maintain their standards of living. High-income people, described by the authors as desiring wealth for its own sake, did the lending.