except, perhaps, here. Via Skydancing, some new research by Josh Mason and Arjun Jayadev shows that it's not increases in household borrowing that has driven higher household debt, but leverage.

Some of the interesting bits:

How can debt have increased if borrowing hasn’t? Though this seems counterintuitive, the answer is simple. We’re not interested in debt per se, but in leverage, defined as the ratio of a sector’s or unit’s debt to its income (or net worth). This ratio can go up because the numerator rises, or because the denominator falls. Household leverage increased sharply, for instance, in 1930 and 1931 (see Figure 1) but people weren’t were consuming more in the Depression; leverage rose because incomes and prices were falling faster than households could pay down debt. Similarly, changes in interest rates can change the debt burden without any shift in household consumption, because a level of spending that would be compatible with a stable debt-income ratio when interest rates are low will lead to a rising ratio when interest rates are higher.

[snip]

These dynamics are familiar when it comes to public debt. As a matter of accounting, the same equation applies to household and business debt as well. But strangely [or not -- Val], despite the example of the Depression (and Irving Fisher’s famous diagnosis of rising debt burdens caused by falling prices and incomes (Fisher 1933)), no one has systematically examined what fraction of changes in private debt can be attributed to changes in interest, growth, inflation and new borrowing.

What we find is that the entire increase in household leverage after 1980 can be attributed to the non-borrowing components of the equation above — what we call Fisher dynamics. If interest rates, growth and inflation over 1981-2011 had remained at their average levels of the previous 30 years, then the exact same spending decisions by households would have resulted in a debt-to-income ratio in 2010 below that of 1980, as shown in Figure 2. The 1980s, in particular, were a kind of slow-motion debt-deflation, or debt-disinflation; the entire growth in debt relative to earlier periods (17 percent of household income, compared with just 3 percent in the 1970s) is due to the slower growth in nominal income as a result of falling inflation. In other words, there is no reason to think that aggregate household borrowing behavior changed after 1980; indeed households rescued their borrowing in the face of higher interest rates just as one would expect rational agents to. The problem is that they didn’t, or couldn’t, reduce borrowing fast enough to make up for the fact that after the Volcker disinflation, leverage was no longer being eroded by rising prices.

Hopefully, Correntians with better heads for the supporting information than mine can evaluate the underlying numbers.

But if the authors are correct, then this pretty much blows away the elite's narrative that there's nothing that can be done for the 99% because they are all irresponsible slackers who just can't stop wild credit card usage.