Loans Repayments in Households’ Savings

For more than 200 years loans repayments have been the forgotten component of households savings. However the effects of debt on households consumption have become an important issue in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Such a long omission is mainly due to the lack of data. Loans repayments are not included in national accounts. As for France, a new estimate indicates that “reals” repayments – those not financed by new loans – amount to around 40 % of the households’ annual savings flow. Gathering numerous and still lacking information is needed to confirm this estimate. Only when central banks publish long temporal series of “real” and “false” repayments, will original econometric works improve significantly the knowledge of economic and financial households’ behaviour.