The great myth of the last few decades is that people can establish sustainable savings by investing in other people’s debt. That is how relatively astute and candid writers, such as Jeremy Warner for the Telegraph, can claim that “Britain is still a hugely wealthy nation” and actually mean it. In his latest blog post, Warner tries to convince us that aggregate private debt in Britain is not so bad when we factor in “assets” as well.

From his piece:

Believe it or not, Britain is still a hugely wealthy nation

Last week I drew attention to a report by Royal Bank of Scotland, which argued that we were only about a third of the way through the process of household deleveraging – that is the reduction relative to income in household debt – and that continued adjustment in this regard would act as a significant drag on domestic demand for many years to come.