Word: household
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...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...
...that other figures will come to have their portraits hung next to the Ibis in the shrine—Zachary, the light-skinned freedman who rises from carpenter to first-mate on the Ibis during its disastrous journey from America; Jodu, a young boatman who grew up in the household of an aristocratic Frenchman; Neel, a fading maharajah—but by the end of this novel they have only just come together onboard the real ship. The volume’s closing image is of Deeti and Zachary on the deck of the Ibis, the first physical meeting...