2014年经济学人 资不抵债 愈发艰难（在线收听）

Insolvency

Going under

A lot of people are still going bankrupt

GOVERNMENT ministers took a break from wooing the Scots on September 17th to crow over Britain’s strengthening job market. Unemployment now stands at just 6.2%—down from a peak of 8.4% in late 2011, and not much higher than the 5% rates that were normal before the financial crisis. Another economic indicator, however, doesn’t look so good.

In 2000 the insolvency rate in Britain was just 7.4 per 100,000 adults. That shot up to 32.4 in 2010 before falling for the past four years. But it ticked up again in the second quarter of 2014, to 22.8 per 100,000. “The dip has really bottomed out,” says R3, the insolvency trade body.

One reason for the rise in insolvencies after 2000 was that it became easier to file for an Individual Voluntary Arrangement, which allows debtors to pay money back over a period of time. Then, in 2009, the government created the Debt Relief Order—sometimes called “bankruptcy lite”—for people with a maximum debt of 15,000. Other possible explanations for the rise over the years include a spendthrift attitude among the growing number of people unable to get on the housing ladder and the growth of student loans, which have normalised the idea of debt, suggests Andrew Tate of R3.

Young women are more likely to go bust than are young men. Louise Brittain of Wilkins Kennedy, an accountancy firm, says many more women are taking risks as entrepreneurs these days, so more are ending up in trouble. But only a quarter of all personal bankruptcies in the first quarter of this year were of self-employed people. The biggest problem for both men and women is credit-card bingeing, she says.

Mr Tate worries most about the growth of debt management plans. These often involve cold-calling people in debt and offering to negotiate with creditors for a fee. A recent R3 survey found that 4% of British adults—about 2m people—are in some kind of DMP. Since only about 250,000 are formally insolvent, the problem might be bigger than it appears. Some debtors cannot afford the 705 fee to apply for bankruptcy. Others have debts too high to apply for a DRO. R3 suggests raising the debt maximum for DROs to 30,000 and letting the fee be paid in instalments.

Such moves may help, but a bigger problem looms. If interest rates were to rise to the sort of levels normal before the financial crisis, many homeowners could not absorb them, says Ms Brittain.