Businesses and households increase their debt by 8.6% in 2019
The debt of the non-financial sector and of households in bank loans and issued debt securities,1 as of 1 January 2020, totalled 61.0 trillion rubles, having increased over the year by 4.9 trillion rubles, or 8.6%, mainly due to expanding bank lending in rubles, with a contraction in foreign currency debt, the Bank of Russia’s statistics show.
The debt of the non-financial sector rose in 2019 by 1.8 trillion ruble, or 4.5%. The share of FX debt of non-financial organisations shrank steadily over 2019, coming in at 14.8% as of 1 January 2020. Annual growth of non-financial organisations’ debt in bank loans in rubles slowed to 8.1% at the end of the year, whereas the indicator for outstanding bonds rose to 11.8%. Nevertheless, the structure of the ruble-denominated debt of non-financial organisations, as before, mainly included bank lending: outstanding bank loans accounted for 81.4% of the debt structure as of early January 2020.
Households’ debt increased over the year by 3 trillion rubles, to 19.1 trillion rubles as of 1 January 2020, and consisted almost entirely of ruble-denominated liabilities. FX loans accounted for 0.7% of household loans as of 1 January 2020, which is the lowest reading during the whole period of calculation. Annual growth of households’ debt in ruble bank loans as of 1 January 2020 stood at 19.3%, having slowed down by 3 pp compared to the previous year.
1 The debt of the non-financial sector and of households in bank loans and issued debt securities is a comprehensive indicator that comprises monetary and securities statistics and allows prompt assessment of the trends in fund raising in the credit and equity market.