They speak different languages, live in countries rich and poor, face horrible job markets and healthy ones. When it comes to money, though, they act as one: They’re holding tight to their cash, driven more by a fear of losing what they have than a desire to add to it. Five years after US investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis and shattering confidence worldwide, families in countries as varied as the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany remain hunkered down, too spooked and distrustful to take chances with their money. An Associated Press analysis of households in the 10 biggest economies shows that families continue to spend cautiously and have pulled hundreds of billions of dollars out of stocks, cut borrowing for the first time in decades and poured money into savings and bonds that offer puny interest payments, often too low to keep up with inflation.
“It doesn’t take very much to destroy confidence, but it takes an awful lot to build it back,” says Ian Bright, senior economist at ING, a global bank based in Amsterdam. “The attitude toward risk is permanently reset.”
A flight to safety on such a global scale is unprecedented since the end of World War II. The implications are huge: Shunning debt and spending less can be good for one family’s finances. When hundreds of millions do it together, it can starve the global economy. Consumers around the world will eventually shake their fears, of course, and loosen the hold on their money. But few economists expect them to snap back to their old ways.
One reason is that the boom years that preceded the financial crisis were fueled by families taking on enormous debt, experts now realize, not by healthy wage gains. No one expects a repeat of those excesses. Economists cite psychological “scarring,” a fear of losing money that grips people during a period of collapsing jobs, incomes and wealth, then doesn’t let go, even when better times return. Think of Americans who suffered through the Great Depression and stayed frugal for decades.
Although not on a level with the Depression, some economists think the psychological blow of the financial crisis was severe enough that households won’t increase their borrowing and spending to what would be considered normal levels for another five years or longer.AP
