Word: household
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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...
...ratings agency Standard & Poor's says there are 140 large U.S. companies on its "Weakest Links" list of low quality debtors - the group "most vulnerable to default." That's up nearly twofold from the beginning of this year. Among the troubled firms on the agency's list are such household names as clothing retailer Eddie Bauer, amusement park operator Six Flags and pizza chain Sbarro. Also on the list are doughnut baker Krispy Kreme and mobile technology titan Palm, as well as a number of the nation's largest airlines, including JetBlue and the corporate parents of United and American...
...value for them in a market where the price of houses is falling - buying them at face value could cost more than $1 trillion. And some observers believe that bailouts of individual homeowners will create an incentive for many more Americans to relieve pressure on their household budgets by stopping their own mortgage payments in order to get government help...
...slowed, and economists say it should also drop back in Britain. Still, by borrowing huge amounts of cash to inject into the financial system, governments could create a medium-term inflation problem of their own. What's tricky is that the alternative is also a serious possibility: if household spending and business investment drop sharply and exports don't take up the slack, Europe could be confronted with deflation of the sort that took hold in Japan in the 1990s. "We're somewhere between the two," says Riches-Flores of Société Générale...
...home mortgages approved by lenders fell dramatically in August. Including other forms of consumer credit, total net lending plunged by 86% from its level a year ago, according to Bank of England statistics. Just as Europe's banks were overextended, so consumers in many countries ramped up their household borrowing in the past few years - usually because rising house prices made them feel richer. For policymakers, the critical issue is the speed with which the inevitable weaning off of credit now takes place. If the "deleveraging" is quick, it will mean the European economy will be much better placed...