Accessible Version
From-Whom-to-Whom Relationships in the Financial Accounts of the United States: A New Methodology and Some Early Results, Accessible Data
Figure 1. Household Liabilities by Holder
This is a stacked line chart titled "Household Liabilities by Holder." The x-axis measures time and ranges from years 1995:Q1 to 2022:Q4. The y-axis measures trillions of U.S. dollars and ranges from 0 to 20. The data are quarterly. Instruments include all instruments except corporate equities. Issuers are households and nonprofit organizations. Holders include the following sectors of the Accounts, aggregated as follows: the “Shadow Banks” sector is defined following footnote 11 in the 2023 FEDS note “From-Whom-to-Whom Relationships in the Financial Accounts of the United States: A New Methodology and Some Early Results“ by Michael Batty, Elizabeth Holmquist, and Robert Kurtzman; “Banks” include holding companies and all private depository institutions, which is composed of U.S.-chartered depository institutions, foreign banking offices in the United States, banks in U.S.-affiliated areas, and credit unions; “Fed. Govt.” is the federal government sector; “GSEs” include government-sponsored enterprises and agency- and GSE- backed mortgage pools; “Insurance and pensions” are property-casualty insurance companies, life insurance companies (which includes their general and separate accounts), and private and public pension funds (which includes the defined benefit and defined contribution plans for private funds), federal government employee retirement funds, and state and local government employee retirement funds; “Other nonfinancial” includes households and nonprofit organizations, state and local governments, and corporate and noncorporate businesses. We exclude the “Monetary Authority” sector and the “Rest of the World” sectors from the figure, though they have nonzero (albeit small) holdings, as their holdings were not visible on the chart. We also exclude the discrepancy sector from these calculations. The source is Authors’ calculations using the FWTW data set derived from the Financial Accounts of the United States, March 9, 2023.
The overall trend summing across sectors has been steadily increasing from about 4.8 trillion in 1995:Q1 to about 19.4 trillion in 2022:Q4. The disaggregation of the six sector variables will be described based on their actual size (unstacked). To get the overall trend, one would add together the unstacked sector levels. The bottom variable on the chart, ‘Other nonfinancial', is designated by red shading. This variable increases from about 0.45 trillion in 1995:Q1 to about 0.95 trillion 2010:Q1. It then declines modestly, through the rest of the period, ending at 0.86 in 2022:Q4. The second-from-the-bottom variable on the chart, ‘Insurance and pensions,’ is in grey. This variable increases modestly through the sample period from about 0.16 trillion in 1995:Q1 to about 0.3 trillion in 2022:Q4. The third-from-the-bottom variable on the chart, ‘Banks,’ is in orange. This variable rises through the sample period, from about 1.8 trillion in 1995:Q1 to about 6.7 trillion in 2022:Q4. The fourth-from-the-bottom variable on the chart, ‘GSEs,’ is in green. This variable rises through the sample period, from about 1.6 trillion in 1995:Q1 to about 8.3 trillion in 2022:Q4. The fifth-from-the-bottom variable on the chart, ‘Fed. Govt.,’ is in brown. This variable rises modestly from about 0.06 trillion in 1995:Q1 to about 0.2 trillion 2009:Q1. It then rises at a faster rate, reaching about 1.6 trillion in 2022:Q4. The top variable on the chart, ‘Shadow Banks,’ is in blue. This variable fluctuates most noticeably, starting at about 0.65 trillion in 1995:Q1, increasing to around 2 trillion in 2003:Q1, then rising more rapidly to a peak of around 4.4 trillion in 2007:Q2. It then falls to around 2.5 trillion by 2011:Q2 and then about 2 trillion by 2014:Q1. On net, the variable ends the period in 2022:Q4 at about 1.6 trillion, though at times since 2014:Q1 it was somewhat above and below that level.
Notes: Legend identifies area segments from left to right for each period. The figure is a stacked area plot with holdings (in trillions of dollars) of household and nonprofit organization liabilities by sector categorization. The data are calculated as described in Section 1. Instruments include all instruments (as listed in Table 2) except corporate equities. Issuers are households and nonprofit organizations. Holders include the following sectors of the Accounts, aggregated as follows: the "Shadow Banks" sector is defined following footnote 11; "Banks" include holding companies and all private depository institutions, which is composed of U.S.-chartered depository institutions, foreign banking offices in the United States, banks in U.S.-affiliated areas, and credit unions; "Fed. Govt." is the federal government sector; "GSEs" include government-sponsored enterprises and agency- and GSE- backed mortgage pools; "Insurance and pensions" are property-casualty insurance companies, life insurance companies (which includes their general and separate accounts), and private and public pension funds (which includes the defined benefit and defined contribution plans for private funds, federal government employee retirement funds, and state and local government employee retirement funds); "Other nonfinancial" includes households and nonprofit organizations, state and local governments, and corporate and noncorporate businesses. We exclude the "Monetary Authority" sector and the "Rest of the World" sectors from the figure, though they have nonzero (albeit small) holdings, as their holdings were not visible on the chart. We also exclude the discrepancy sector from these calculations.
Source: Authors' calculations using the FWTW data set derived from the Financial Accounts of the United States, March 9, 2023.