Word: household
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thought that increasingly wealthy Chinese, with their appetite for cars, mobile phones and Big Macs, could help fill the breach opened by retreating American spenders. But that hope, too, is fading. Though Chinese spending is so far holding up - retail sales of consumer goods jumped 23% in September - household consumption, at only 40% of GDP (compared with about 65% in industrialized countries), isn't yet substantial enough to maintain China's high growth rates. "I don't think [domestic spending] will replace what has been lost in exports," says UBS economist Wang Tao. Nor will it offset another weakening pillar...
...American consumers had become more addicted to debt than Wall Street was. Total household debt at the end of last year was $13.8 trillion, up 20% since 2005. At the same time, the household savings rate ticked down close to zero; the rocket's engine was running on empty...
...because the financial crisis is taking place at the same time as a real estate downturn, a conjunction that is unusual; in the past, one has often followed the other, but it's rare for them to happen simultaneously. And the problems are being exacerbated by an explosion of household debt in Britain. Buoyed by rising property prices, households ratcheted up their borrowing to a massive 173% of disposable income, vs. 106% in 1995. That's way above even that paragon of profligacy, the U.S., where household debt amounts to 139% of income...
...women were more likely than men to say they had symptoms of stress--including irritability and weariness. Plus, their stress levels had risen more sharply over the past six months than men's. So it's harder for women to take up their traditional role as household comforter and easier for the wheels to fall off the whole enterprise...
...dirty, dangerous time but also a weirdly innocent one. Slavery exists--a humane farmer named Jacob Vaark accepts Florens as payment for a bad debt--but A Mercy is not precisely a novel about slavery. When Florens enters Jacob's household, she finds not a rigid caste system based on race but a fluid, funky multicultural arrangement that includes not only Florens but also Jacob's wife, a Native American maid, two indentured servants and an orphan foundling. Their relationships with one another are flexible, and race is just one of any number of things that define them...