U.S. households reduced debt during the first quarter by 1% to the lowest level since 2006, resuming a deleveraging trend in the wake of the financial crisis, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Household debt fell to $11.2 trillion in the first quarter compared with a peak burden of $12.7 trillion in the third quarter of 2008. Consumers reduced debt by $110 billion after increasing their borrowing by $31 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, while delinquency rates fell “across the board,” the Fed district bank said in a statement.
“Household deleveraging has resumed its previous trajectory,” Wilbert van der Klaauw, a senior vice president and economist at the New York Fed, said today in a statement. “We’ll look to see if this pace of debt reduction and delinquency improvements will persist.”
Consumers are repairing their post-crisis balance sheets as the Fed tries to spur the expansion and enliven the job market by holding the main interest rate at zero and buying $85 billion in bonds every month. More than four years of record stimulus have yet to reignite household borrowing, and the unemployment rate has exceeded 7% since December 2008.
Households in the first quarter improved their debt payment patterns as delinquency rates on mortgages fell to 5.4% from 5.6%, on home equity loans to 3.2% from 3.5%, on credit cards to 10.2% from 10.6% and on student loans to 11.2% from 11.7%, according to the New York Fed.
Mortgage debt led the decline, falling to $7.93 trillion from $8.03 trillion, along with credit card balances, which decreased $19 billion to $660 billion, according to the Fed regional bank.
The statistics are based on figures from a nationally representative random sample provided by the Equifax Inc. credit bureau.
The deleveraging coincided with bank easing on the standards and terms for many types of loans, according to a separate quarterly Fed survey of senior loan officers. Demand for business loans increased, while “on the household side, the survey results were more mixed,” the Fed said last week in a description of the April 2-16 survey.
Banks in the U.S. have boosted lending as the economy gains strength. The total value of loans at U.S. banks climbed 3.7% in the past year to $7.3 trillion in April, according to a separate Fed report on the assets and liabilities of commercial banks. Lending to businesses has led the way, with commercial and industrial loans climbing to $1.55 trillion in April, an increase of 10% from a year earlier.
