Morgan Housel

An average across everybody, across all households.

Really, it has already come down.

It has been coming down for 15 years and is at a level now that we haven't really seen in 20 or 30 years.

I think probably a lot of that.

Well, it's a couple of things.

Some of it is bad, which is that the home ownership rate among the young generation is much less than it used to be.

And so they don't have mortgage debt.

They would love to have mortgage debt.

The best thing in their life would be to have some mortgage debt, but they don't, they're renting, which is not debt.

So that's part of it.

I think there's also in a good way,

Still the aftershock scars of 2008 that made a lot of people, particularly millennials, scared of debt in a great way, particularly credit card debt.

And so their aversion to it, there's still a trillion plus dollars of credit card debt since it hasn't gone away, but as a share of income relative to what it was in the late 90s, early 2000s, it's much lower today.

And here's another thing.

I've written about this before.

This gets a little technical, but government debt as a share of GDP has gone way up.

We've established that.

Household debt and corporate debt as a share of their income has gone down.

And if you average those two things together, the whole pot, all economic debt, government, private, corporate, everything, all debt as a share of all income,

It's gone up.