—In the US, the UK, and the EU, the ratio of household debt to GDP has been rising alarmingly since the 1980s. Even so, these broad measures conceal the very differences that the wealth and inequality figures revealed: debt means rather different things for households at different ends of the scale. For wealthier households, more debt is associated with greater ability to borrow for houses, durable goods, education, and so on. For everybody else, increased debt should be seen in the context of the persistent stagnation in wages, where borrowing against a house became the easiest and perhaps the only way to support consumption. In either case, those who took on debt in the form of mortgages and home equity loans are now seeing their equity flowing back to the financial institutions. And people will find themselves even more vulnerable in the downturn. (In 2007, household debt as a percentage of disposable income topped 130 percent in the US; the EU ratio was about 90 percent.)