The New York Fed just put out its latest report on household debt. It's a good, quick-ish look at the debt picture for ordinary Americans. Here's the key graph:
![](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/caecb87/2147483647/strip/true/crop/753x464+0+0/resize/880x542!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Fassets%2Fimg%2F2012%2F08%2F29%2Fhouseholddebt0812_custom-5bd1e3ced66f512661376a7fd5432c907ccdd9c3.jpg)
/ New York Fed
/
New York Fed
It shows:
* Household debt is overwhelmingly about mortgages.
* Mortgage debt shot up during the housing boom, and has slowly — slowly — been falling for the past several years.
* The decline has been driven both by people paying off their mortgages and by people going through foreclosure. (Actually, that fact is shown by another graph.)
* Also, as you've probably heard: Student debt is rising.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.