Hushållens skuldsättning - risker och lösningar

Sammanfattning: The Swedish household debts are, both internationally and historically, high and are expected to increase for many years to come. High household debt is beneficial for the economic growth in the country, but may at the same time implicate a risk to the financial stability and for the Swedish economy in general. High household debts and rising housing prices have made economic turndowns worse in several countries during the last financial crisis. Experiences show that it’s mostly households with high household debts that decreases their consumption during economical disturbance. It is therefore important to stabilize the household debts in order to not risk to make a coming recession even worse. The aim with this study is to analyze different actions that can be done in order to decrease household debts in Sweden and therefore favor the financial stability in the country. Actions that have been done in other countries are used to analyze how these actions would affect the household debts and the financial stability in Sweden, how the underlying elements of the household debts are affected and how four different representative households’ economies are affected. The study begins with a literature study to give basic knowledge about the housing- and mortgage markets. Then the underlying elements of the household debts are presented in order to later be able to analyze how these, the household debts, the economic growth and the household’s economies are affected by the actions. How the households’ economies are affected is made through a life cycle perspective where the different households are in different steps of their housingcareer. The actions made by other countries to subdue the household debts and that are analyzed in this paper are: Amortization requirement, deregulate the rental market, adjust the interest deduction rate, loan-to-income limits and lowered loan-to-value limits. The actions are decreasing the risk for financial instability compared to if nothing is made. At the same time some of them affect the economic growth negatively. Therefore consideration between lowering the household debts and stronger economic growth must be done. A natural measure to compare the alternatives would therefore be the expected decrease in risk for financial instability divided by the expected change in economic growth. Despite any of the action is made the household debts will still increase, although not at the same pace, hence also the risk for financial instability will remain. In order to decrease the household debts a combination of actions must be done. The report leads to the following ranking of the actions: 1. Deregulate the rental market 2. Adjust the interest deduction rate 3. Amortization requirement 4. Lowered loan-to-value limits 5. Loan-to-income limits