If the UK crashes, so do we.

We’re addicted to debt and headed for a crash. It could be worse than 2007

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/04/britain-addicted-debt-crash-2007-sub-prime-mortgages-personal-credit?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

Excerpt: When Provident Financial lost £1.7bn in share value a little over a week ago, a handful of people asked whether this was a Northern Rock moment. The Provident extends high-interest loans to low-income people, and as such could be seen as a bellwether in the manner of a sub-prime mortgage company, the first to go under when debt becomes unbearable, the signal that credit is, once again, about to crunch. The immediate anxiety, voiced by the economist and Green party MEP Molly Scott Cato, was that the financial system may have done something perilously stupid. Again. “If they’re bundling up these assets and selling them on, that will be much more serious,” she said. This is, of course, what determined the depth of the last crash, the wheeze of the collateralised debt obligation, which left no one able to distinguish between a good debt and a bad one. Ten years on from the start of the crash, we could get bitten by the same manoeuvre that everybody has spent the past decade saying was a terrible idea.