Consumers (Modestly) Improving Balance Sheets

March 15, 2010 10:30am by Barry Ritholtz

On Friday, the Federal Reserve released their Z.1 Flow of Funds statement for Q4 2009.

FoF is essentially a snapshot of households, companies and governement’s balance sheet. It showed a very modest improvement in the aggregate debt levels.

Barron’s noted that consumers showed some signs of cleaning up their balance sheets ever so slightly:

The Numbers
1.3%: gain in U.S. household net worth in the fourth quarter from the third
$54.18 trillion: household net worth in the fourth quarter
1.7%: decline in U.S. household debt in 2009, the first annual drop since record-keeping began in 1945
$13.5 trillion: total household debt in 2009

Sources: Federal Reserve, Barron’s

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