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Household Debt : Falling. Slowly.

The New York Fed just put out its latest report on household debt. It's a good, quick-ish look at the debt picture for ordinary Americans. Here's the key graph:

/ New York Fed
/
New York Fed

It shows:

* Household debt is overwhelmingly about mortgages.

* Mortgage debt shot up during the housing boom, and has slowly — slowly — been falling for the past several years.

* The decline has been driven both by people paying off their mortgages and by people going through foreclosure. (Actually, that fact is shown by another graph.)

* Also, as you've probably heard: Student debt is rising.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Jacob Goldstein is an NPR correspondent and co-host of the Planet Money podcast. He is the author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.
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