Jon Cunliffe: Credit - can trees grow to the sky?
Speech by Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability of the Bank of England, at
the British Property Federation Annual Residential Investment Conference, London,
9 February 2016.
* * *
Accompanying charts can be found at the end of the speech.
Evolution of private credit
In 1880, the stock of aggregate bank lending to the private non-financial sector in the British
economy was around 16% of GDP.1
It grew, gradually, over the next 100 years, except in the periods of the first and second world
wars, when it fell sharply. In 1950, the stock of aggregate lending which includes credit
provided by non-bank institutions, was 63%. It rose and fell of course but it broadly stayed
around that level for the next 30 years. It was 63% in 1980.
The rate of growth changed markedly in the last 20 years of the century which was a period of
first liberalisation and then globalisation of the financial sector (Chart 1). Credit began to grow
consistently faster than the economy. As a result, the stock of credit increased rapidly from
63% of GDP in 1980 to 120% by the early 1990s. It paused for a few years following the
recession of the early 1990s, and then resumed its upward path. By 2009 it had reached 177%
of GDP - one and three quarter times the annual product of the economy. In aggregate,
advanced economies saw a similar upward trend (Chart 2).
In the 10 years between 1997 and 2007, the annualised growth rate of real credit was 7%,
relative to real GDP growth of 3%. That meant credit grew at more than double the rate of the
economy over the period. Had this trend continued the stock of credit would have been 200%
of GDP by 2012 and 300% of GDP by 2023.
The great recession that followed the financial crisis saw a sharp correction. Credit went into
reverse, shrinking annually by around 2.5% a year in real terms from 2010-2014. By 2014 the
stock of credit had dropped from its peak of 177% of GDP to 140% - and remains around that
level. To put it in context, we are now back to where we were in 2002. Credit to GDP would
have to fall another 25 percentage points to get back to 1997.
Credit, of course, is another way of saying debt. As most of the lending during the long period
of pre-crisis credit growth was to UK households, the stock of UK households' debt relative to
their income not surprisingly follows a similar path to the stock of credit to GDP. In 1964, it was
54% and remained around this level until 1980; but by 1990 it had exceeded 100%. It surged
again from the late 1990s - by 2007 it had grown to 155%. It fell to 135%, its 2004 level, in
2012 and remains around there.
So between the mid-1990s and the financial crisis, the UK experienced a very powerful
financial cycle - a long build-up of credit to the private sector followed by a sharp correction
that has reversed some but not most of the preceding credit growth. There were of course
other important elements such as lending overseas and between banks, and some would
argue lending to governments. But I want today to focus on credit to the UK private sector,
particularly household credit.
I want to look at what lay behind the upswing of that cycle, the marked rise of credit to GDP
since 1997. This is of more than academic interest. We are back to early 2000s levels of credit
and debt in the economy. We are now emerging from the post crisis period of credit contraction;
in the UK credit slowly began to grow again around 2012. It is now growing at almost the same
rate as the economy.
So now is a good time to ask: what lay behind the very rapid expansion of credit from the
mid1990s to the crisis? Should we expect - or want - credit growth to return to its pre-crisis path,
growing more than twice as fast as GDP? This is an important question for the Financial Policy
Committee of the Bank of England as it assesses the risks to the stability of the UK financial
system - where we are in the so-called "financial cycle"?
Before I start, however, there are three important points to bear in mind.
The first is that credit or debt is not "bad". It is an essential part of what makes modern
economies grow. It facilitates consumption smoothing, house purchases, investment and risk
management. The last eight years have demonstrated what happens to the economy when
the credit mechanism is badly damaged.2
Nor does the stock of credit to GDP have to be constant; there are good reasons, as I will try
to set out, why advanced economies may have been able to sustain and indeed benefit from
an increase in the level of credit to GDP.
Our economy and society would be very different, and I suspect much less congenial if the
credit to GDP ratio were at its 1880 level of 16%.
The issue rather is what are the financial stability and broader economic risks for the UK if
credit consistently grows faster than GDP and as a result debt to income resumes its upward
path? That cannot continue indefinitely. Trees cannot grow to the sky.
The second important point to make at the outset is that the great financial crisis of 2007 was
not triggered by UK households' build up of debt. But the debt made our economy much more
vulnerable when the shock hit us. And high stocks of household debt - especially when
secured on housing assets - have been at the root of many other financial crises in the past. I
will say more about this later on.
My third point is that, for every financial debt there is obviously a corresponding financial asset,
owned either by domestic residents or foreigners. There is a lender for every borrower. Net
indebtedness, in this sense, is zero by definition. What matters, therefore, is how the debt and
assets are matched and how the debt is distributed across the population. If debt is
concentrated in households with low liquid financial assets, and high marginal propensities to
consume, that is a more vulnerable scenario than if debt is more evenly distributed across the
population. I'll also return to this issue below.
Financial cycle
And the idea itself of a "financial cycle" is perhaps the best place to start.
We are not here talking about the business or economic cycle - that is, the regular "ups and
downs" in economic activity we observe in indicators like employment and GDP. By contrast,
financial cycles are the persistent and possibly self-reinforcing build up of leverage, increases
in asset prices and loosening of credit conditions over time. They don't always end in tears.
But they often do: the peaks of financial cycles tend to be closely associated with financial
crises and the possibility of "serious distress and dislocations".3
And they are long lived - probably on average around 15 years from one peak to the next.4 In
contrast, business cycles are typically relatively short-lived affairs: for instance, the average
duration of business cycles in the UK and US economy in the post-war period has been
estimated at 5 1⁄2 years.5
However, though financial cycles build up much more slowly than business cycles, the
amplitude - the swings between the peaks and troughs - is greater. In the UK the
peak-totrough variation in credit has been around 40 percentage points on average for financial cycles,
whereas the average peak to trough change in GDP in the business cycle has been around
10 percentage points.
Financial cycles do not always mirror or drive business cycles. To a headline writer, the fact
that credit grew twice as fast as GDP for 10 years before 2007 and that household debt rose
from levels of around 100% of household income in 1997 to 155% shouts "unsustainable, debt
financed growth". But over those 10 years, the economy was not obviously growing at
abovenormal rates and inflation remained subdued, albeit aided perhaps by the favourable terms of
trade shock that followed China's admission to the World Trade Organisation in 2001.6 While
the increase in debt may have had some impact on growth, the UK certainly did not appear to
enjoy a credit financed boom.
So one very important lesson in this is that traditional indicators of the business cycle cannot
be relied upon to flash warning lights about vulnerabilities building up in the financial system.
Where did the money go?
If the total amount of UK private credit in the economy rose sharply in the 10 years before the
crisis without much impact on private sector demand or the economy as a whole, where did
the money go?
Some went to business - around a third, much of it to commercial real estate. But the bulk,
around two-thirds of the credit, was to households (Chart 3). Bank lending to households made
a particularly large contribution to credit growth in the first half of the 2000s. And while
unsecured lending grew strongly over the period, it only comprised about 10-15% of lending
to households. The much larger part was, of course, secured lending for housing.
And it is fair to call it a boom. Secured household debt relative to annual household income
was stable at around 70% for much of the 1990s, before rising rapidly to over 110% by 2007.
The stock of household debt secured on housing went in real terms from around £300 billion
to £700 billion. The main driver of course was the increase in house prices relative to earnings
over the period - from about 2.5 times climbing to 5 times.
Households have of course a house on their balance sheet - to set against the debt. The debt
stock has grown but so has the value of the housing assets it is financing. The total size of the
household sector's balance sheet grew over the period. But the debt is fixed while the value of
the asset can vary quite widely. And large balance sheets can be vulnerable at times of stress.
I will look at some of the risks around this later on.
Drivers of the credit boom
The obvious and tempting conclusion when looking at the upswing of the last financial cycle,
growth of credit and of household balance sheets in the UK economy is that this was surely
unsustainable.
The reality I think is more complex. As I said at the outset, the growth of credit has been part
of the development of the economy for at least the past 120 years.
Credit cannot grow faster than the economy forever. But the level of debt and the rate of growth
of credit that the economy can sustain is not fixed. It can and has shifted over time. To learn
the lessons of the pre-crisis period, we need to explore whether a shift occurred in the
sustainable level of debt during the upswing of the last cycle and what we should expect for
the future.
There are many interrelated factors that might influence the sustainable level of debt in the
economy. For example, some relatively slow-moving factors such as demographics, tax
policy, housing supply and inflation are likely to play a role. But today I want to highlight two
key factors that may have played a particularly important role in shifting the ratio of credit to
GDP during the upswing of the last cycle. First, the level of long-run real interest rates and
second, credit supply conditions, including credit spreads.
Long-term interest rate
The long-term real interest rate is crucially important both to the level of debt and to the price
of the assets it finances. Structural changes in real interest rates are perhaps the most
important factor in driving a shift in the sustainable level of debt. The real long-term interest
rate is, of course, determined by structural features of the economy, not by central banks.
Enduring changes in the level of real interest rates and in the cost of credit intermediation by
lenders alter the sustainable level of debt service of borrowers. And changes in the interest
rate also affect the net present value, and hence the price, of housing assets. All else equal,
lower rates will increase both the price borrowers can afford to pay and the net present value
of houses.
There has been a substantial fall in the long-term real interest rates of around 4.5 percentage
points over the past 30 years (Chart 4); this trend has occurred across countries. The structural
decline in real rates pushed up on house prices in particular given the inelastic supply. It has
also made a larger debt stock easier to service.
This fall in real rates was clearly an important factor over the period in driving the high rate of
credit growth relative to GDP and the consequent increase in the level of household debt to
income.
Looking forward, to the extent that the fall in interest rates was the result of structural factors
that are likely to last for a long time, the increase in the level of household debt is more likely
to be sustainable. And indeed, recent work in the Bank of England suggests that much of that
fall could well be due to persistent structural factors (Chart 5).7
These factors include a slowing in the underlying global economic growth rate, the rise in
saving due to demographic forces, lower desired investment given a lower relative price of
capital, changes in the income distribution, excess saving in emerging markets and declining
public investment.
However, not all of these factors will support a higher level of debt. In particular a fall in the
potential growth rate of the economy will lower the long-term real interest rate. But it will also
lower long-term income so the overall impact on house values and debt sustainability is likely
to be neutral. On the other hand, some of the factors which affect preferences for desired
saving and investment (demographics and the income distribution, for example), are likely to
lift the sustainable level of debt and asset prices.
Credit spreads and credit supply
The interest rate charged to borrowers and by which risky assets are valued reflects more than
just the risk free rate. It includes the spread above the risk free rate charged by the lender to
reflect the costs and risk of lending. If reductions in the spread above the risk free interest rate
are long lasting, they too will raise both the sustainable level of debt relative to income and the
sustainable level of asset prices.
In the run up to the recent crisis, the spread over the risk free rate fell. For example, lending
spreads on new UK mortgage lending fell from around 100bps in around 2000 to a low of
around 30bps in 2007.
More generally, shifts in credit supply may occur through increased bank competition over
nonprice factors (such as increasing the availability of credit to borrowers with high LTIs and LTVs),
or because of regulatory and other policy changes that affect banks' ability to lend. These shifts
in credit supply may appear as direct increases in the credit to GDP ratio but show up less
obviously in lending rates. Such shifts may show up as increases in deposit rates rather than
falls in lending rates if they affect competition for retail and wholesale funds.
Bank analysis suggests that such reductions in the spread over the risk-free rate played an
important role in raising credit growth relative to GDP during both of the surges in the credit to
GDP ratio since 1980.8 The spread over the risk free rate appears to have fallen due to three
main factors - improvements in "intermediation technology", greater risk appetite by banks,
and greater access by banks to wholesale funding.9
How long should we expect these factors to exert downward pressure on the spread over the
risk-free rate?
Reductions in the business cost of intermediation pushed down on rates and up on credit
growth relative to GDP during the financial liberalisation of the 1980s. They continued to have
an effect, though to a lesser extent, during the 2000s. Such reductions will almost certainly be
long lasting. The underlying drivers such as technological innovation in information gathering
and rising competition are unlikely to go into reverse. Indeed, we might expect technology and
competition to drive intermediation costs down further.
The other factors that pushed down the spread over the risk-free rate in the upswing have
proved to be much less sustainable. The increase in banks' willingness to take risks and in
investors' willingness to provide wholesale funding both unwound sharply in the crisis. This is
likely to have been one factor behind the fall in credit to GDP. Following the post-crisis repair
phase, banks' risk taking and lending spreads now appear to be at a more standard level.
Regulation has been put in place to curtail banks' ability to take excessive risk and to rely on
short-term wholesale funding.
Debt servicing
Another lens through which we can look at the sustainability of the increases in debt and asset
prices during the upswing of the last financial cycle is the debt servicing ratio or "income
gearing".
The aggregate household debt service ratio in the UK rose to 13% in 2007 but is now at its
2001 level of around 8% (Chart 6).10 That is a little below its historic average since 1988.
But while the ratio is back at 2001 levels, its composition is now very different. In 2001, the
debt stock was around £800 billion and the interest rate was 6.7%. Today it is over £1.6 trillion
and the rate has fallen to 3.6%.
These debt service numbers do not include consumer finance which add to the household debt
stock. The stock is small relative to secured lending, at around 10-15% of the stock of secured
lending. But it is growing quickly at around 9% per year. High levels of consumer finance tend
to be associated with households that have high overall debt service levels. The Government
has given the Financial Policy Committee the power to implement limits on the flow of lending
at certain debt-to-income limits in respect of new owner-occupied residential mortgages. This
gives the FPC a tool to target overall household indebtedness should it consider that it posed
a risk to financial stability.
What does the last financial cycle tell us about sustainability?
Putting all of this together, it seems reasonable to conclude that since the 1980s there have
indeed been long lasting forces that pushed down on both the risk-free interest rate and the
spread that lenders charge. This lowered the rates charged to borrowers and raised the price
of houses. It will also have raised the sustainable level of debt.
But it is not at all clear that in future these forces will raise the level of sustainability further.
There is much uncertainty and discussion now about further downward shifts in the real interest
rate as a result of secular stagnation and lower potential economic growth. But though such
effects, if they occur, may continue to push down the risk free interest rate, they will as I have
said, also push down income and are therefore unlikely to improve sustainability.
Judgments about sustainability are difficult. The household debt to income ratio has come
down materially since the crisis - back to its 2004 level of 135%.
The debt service ratio shows a similar picture. It is back to 2001 levels. And, crucially, within
this, we've seen a fall in the proportion of heavily-indebted households and the share of
households spending a high proportion of their income on debt repayments (Chart 7).11
But the position is sensitive to upward shifts in interest rates without a similar increase in
incomes, especially if some of the powerful forces that have pushed rates down since the
1980s begin to unwind. And it is very vulnerable to a resumption of the rise, in credit relative
to GDP driven by housing that we have seen for most of the last 40 years and that we saw
particularly in the upswing of the last financial cycle.
How much do such risks matter?
The growth of credit and household debt relative to GDP and income in the UK did not, as
some commentators have pointed out, trigger the financial crisis in the UK. The proximate
cause was the overseas exposures of UK banks to very risky assets and the extreme fragility
of their capital, funding and liquidity positions. But risky UK mortgage assets, along with UK
commercial property, certainly damaged a number of UK institutions.
One risk from an increase in household balance sheets due to house purchases being financed
by ever increasing amounts of debt is that homeowners can't repay the mortgage in times of
stress. We saw this in the UK in the 1990s. But the main damage in the last crisis from high
levels of UK households' secured debt however did not come so much through bank losses or
through the huge falls in house prices seen in other countries.
Cushioned by the cuts in interest rates to effectively zero, QE, and stronger-than-expected
employment levels12, UK households were largely able to maintain servicing their debt even
though their real income was declining.
Indeed they paid debt down to reduce the size of their balance sheets. But to do so, they cut
back their consumption markedly, thus deepening and prolonging the recession. Real
household consumption fell by 6% between end 2007 and 2009.
This is an important if less well known risk from large household balance sheets. Even if they
pay their mortgages households cut back consumption when house prices fall and uncertainty
about future income increases. This was especially true in the last recession for the more highly
indebted households who cut spending substantially than did less indebted households. That
is, the distribution of debt also matters.
Similar effects were seen in other countries. And there is considerable evidence that
recessions that follow debt financed housing booms are worse. The IMF estimate that for each
additional 10 percentage point rise in household debt prior to the global financial crisis, the
consumption loss (as a percent of pre-crisis trend) was larger by 2.6 percentage points. Other
studies have come to similar conclusions.13
Conclusion
Since the 1980s the UK has seen a sharp and very material increase in the credit to GDP ratio
and in the stock of household debt relative to income. This was particularly pronounced in the
10 year upswing of the last financial cycle when credit grew over twice as fast as GDP.
This surge in credit did not finance an economic boom. Indeed, it showed little in the
conventional indicators of economic activity. It comprised in the main secured lending to
households for housing, driven by house prices rising consistently faster than earnings.
The rise in secured debt and the increase in house prices reflected in part structural reductions
in interest rates. Many of the forces that pushed down on rates over the period are long lasting
and are unlikely to be reversed. To that extent, they have probably raised the sustainable level
of credit to GDP. However, it would, in my view, be unwise to bet on further upward structural
shifts in the level of sustainability.
The high level of debt to income made the UK vulnerable to shocks as we saw in the post crisis
recession. There was a major correction following the crisis that has improved sustainability.
We are now back to early 2000s levels of debt to income and income gearing. Household
balance sheets, however, remain large by historic standards. The position is sensitive to the
unwinding, were it to occur, of some of the forces that pushed rates down over the past 40
years. And of course we remain vulnerable to the resumption of the rates of credit growth,
driven by the housing market, seen in the 10 year upswing of the last cycle. Trees cannot in
the end grow to the sky.
The debt stock of course tends to change relatively slowly. Credit is growing broadly in line
with GDP. If it were to resume growing more than twice as fast as GDP, it could take a number
of years for debt to income to retain its pre-crisis peak. But just as financial cycles build up
over a number of years, the risks they pose are perhaps best managed over time. Given the
vulnerability that already exists and the powerful drivers in the UK, particularly the housing
market, if credit began again to grow faster than GDP, I would want to think about action to
manage the financial stability risks sooner rather than later.
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