Slipping under the radar a bit has been the reports that personal debt is now higher than it has ever been, and a great deal of this debt is on Credit Cards. The TUC are predicting that the average family will have around £15,000 of unsecured debt by 2021.
We can see that from the Banking Crisis in 2008, caused by the Banks and saved with our money, there was a period when people screwed the nut a little and tried to get their debts down. I understand that as I did that myself and continue to keep a very close eye on expenditure on large items and not ashamed to admit it. Craig Murray wrote an interesting blog at the start on July on how we should have let the banks fail, something that many of us blogged about and argued at the time, but of course as Craig points out, Darling and Brown saved their pals with our money but read Craig’s excellent blog, he is far better than I’ll ever be.
Anyway, the Bank of England(actually the UK) reported that in March households in the UK added £1.6 billion pounds to their unsecured debt in one month alone. Total credit card debt at the end of 2016 was £66.7 BILLION Pounds, wow. We are seeing more and more people needing to use credit cards to pay the rent and electricity bills, and as Craig points out, and that again many of us have argued, wage growth now is even lower than in Victorian Times, the Tories are taking us back to the times they enjoyed the most. It is estimated that 21% of people now only survive by using credit cards, and as bills rise, as inflation remains high, the need to use credit cards to survive grows and the personal debt mountain grows. Not for the bankers though, they will be fine they have seen their salaries rise, last year 2,926 bankers in the UK earned more than a million pounds per year.
Now depending on who you believe, Brexit could lead the UK and the EU into another very bad recession, I’m no expert but that feels more likely than any sort of golden new empire. The debt that both the country has and people as individuals have is a time bomb waiting to happen.
Brexit is probably going to be a disaster, wage stagnation as long as the Tories are in power will be the reality, we are on the knife-edge of a crisis and one that might just be worse than 2008. People really need to try to find a way to get personal levels of debt down, it won’t be the politicians or the bankers who will starve it will be us and most of the politicians, esp the Tories, won’t give a shit.
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