BY BERNARD CONDON
AP BUSINESS WRITER
NEW YORK (AP) — They speak different languages, live in countries rich and poor, face horrible job markets and healthy ones. When it comes to money, though, they act as one: They’re holding tight to their cash, driven more by a fear of losing what they have than a desire to add to it.
Five years after U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis and shattering confidence worldwide, families in countries as varied as the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany remain hunkered down, too spooked and distrustful to take chances with their money.
An Associated Press analysis of households in the 10 biggest economies shows that families continue to spend cautiously and have pulled hundreds of billions of dollars out of stocks, cut borrowing for the first time in decades and poured money into savings and bonds that offer puny interest payments, often too low to keep up with inflation.
“It doesn’t take very much to destroy confidence, but it takes an awful lot to build it back,” says Ian Bright, senior economist at ING, a global bank based in Amsterdam. “The attitude toward risk is permanently reset.”
A flight to safety on such a global scale is unprecedented since the end of World War II.
The implications are huge: Shunning debt and spending less can be good for one family’s finances. When hundreds of millions do it together, it can starve the global economy.
Some of the retrenchment is not surprising: High unemployment in many countries means fewer people with paychecks to spend. But even people with good jobs and little fear of losing them remain cautious.
“Lehman changed everything,” says Arne Holzhausen, a senior economist at global insurer Allianz, based in Munich. “It’s safety, safety, safety.”
The AP analyzed data showing what consumers did with their money in the five years before the Great Recession began in December 2007 and in the five years that followed, through the end of 2012. The focus was on the world’s 10 biggest economies – the U.S., China, Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., Brazil, Russia, Italy and India – which have half the world’s population and 65 percent of global gross domestic product.
Key findings:
– RETREAT FROM STOCKS: A desire for safety drove people to dump stocks, even as prices rocketed from crisis lows in early 2009. Investors in the top 10 countries pulled $1.1 trillion from stock mutual funds in the five years after the crisis, or 10 percent of their holdings at the start of that period, according to Lipper Inc., which tracks funds.
They put more even money into bond mutual funds – $1.3 trillion – even as interest payments on bonds plunged to record lows.
– SHUNNING DEBT: In the five years before the crisis, household debt in the 10 countries jumped 34 percent, according to Credit Suisse. Then the financial crisis hit, and people slammed the brakes on borrowing. Debt per adult in the 10 countries fell 1 percent in the 4 1/2 years after 2007. Economists say debt hasn’t fallen in sync like that since the end of World War II.
People chose to shed debt even as lenders slashed rates on loans to record lows. In normal times, that would have triggered an avalanche of borrowing.
– HOARDING CASH: Looking for safety for their money, households in the six biggest developed economies added $3.3 trillion, or 15 percent, to their cash holdings in the five years after the crisis, slightly more than they did in the five years before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The growth of cash is remarkable because millions more were unemployed, wages grew slowly and people diverted billions to pay down their debts.
– SPENDING SLUMP: To cut debt and save more, people have reined in their spending. Adjusting for inflation, global consumer spending rose 1.6 percent a year during the five years after the crisis, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accounting and consulting firm. That was about half the growth rate before the crisis and only slightly more than the annual growth in population during those years.
Consumer spending is critically important because it accounts for more than 60 percent of GDP.
– DEVELOPING WORLD NOT HELPING ENOUGH: When the financial crisis hit, the major developed countries looked to the developing world to take over in powering global growth. The four big developing countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – recovered quickly from the crisis. But the potential of the BRIC countries, as they are known, was overrated. Although they have 80 percent of the people, they accounted for only 22 percent of consumer spending in the 10 biggest countries last year, according to Haver Analytics, a research firm. This year, their economies are stumbling.
Consumers around the world will eventually shake their fears, of course, and loosen the hold on their money. But few economists expect them to snap back to their old ways.
One reason is that the boom years that preceded the financial crisis were fueled by families taking on enormous debt, experts now realize, not by healthy wage gains. No one expects a repeat of those excesses.
More importantly, economists cite psychological “scarring,” a fear of losing money that grips people during a period of collapsing jobs, incomes and wealth, then doesn’t let go, even when better times return. Think of Americans who suffered through the Great Depression and stayed frugal for decades.
Although not on a level with the Depression, some economists think the psychological blow of the financial crisis was severe enough that households won’t increase their borrowing and spending to what would be considered normal levels for another five years or longer.
To better understand why people remain so cautious five years after the crisis, AP interviewed consumers around the world. A look at what they’re thinking – and doing – with their money:
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Rick Stonecipher of Muncie, Ind., doesn’t like stocks anymore, for the same reason that millions of investors have turned against them – the stock market crash that began in October 2008 and didn’t end until the following March.
“My brokers said they were really safe, but they weren’t,” says Stonecipher, 59, a substitute school teacher.
Americans sold the most in the five years after the crisis – $521 billion, or 9 percent of their mutual fund holdings, according to Lipper. But investors in other countries sold a larger share of their holdings: Germans dumped 13 percent; Italians and French, more than 16 percent each.
The French are “not very oriented to risk,” says Cyril Blesson, an economist at Pair Conseil, an investment consultancy in Paris. “Now, it’s even worse.”
It’s gotten worse in China, Russia and the U.K., too.
Fu Lili, 31, a psychologist in Fu Xin, a city in northeastern China, says she made 20,000 yuan ($3,267) buying and selling stocks before the crisis, more than 10 times her monthly salary then. But she won’t touch them now, because she’s too scared.
In Moscow, Yuri Shcherbanin, 32, a manager for an oil company, says the crash proved stocks were dangerous and he should content himself with money in the bank.
In London, Pavlina Samson, 39, owner of a jewelry and clothes shop, says stocks are too “risky.” What’s also driving her away may be something that runs deeper: “People feel like they’re being ripped off everywhere,” she says.
Holzhausen, the Allianz economist, says the crisis taught people not to trust others with their money. “People want to get as much distance as possible from the financial system,” he says.
The crisis also taught them about the dangers of debt.
After the crisis hit, Jerry and Madeleine Bosco of Tujunga, Calif., found themselves facing $30,000 in credit card bills with no easy way to pay the debt off. So they sold stocks, threw most of their cards in the trash, and stopped eating out and taking vacations.
Today, most of the debt is gone, but the lusher life of the boom years is a distant memory. “We had credit cards and we didn’t worry about a thing,” says Madeleine, 55.
In the U.S., debt per adult soared 54 percent in the five years before the crisis. Then it plunged, down 12 percent in 4 1/2 years, although most of that resulted from people defaulting on loans. In the U.K., debt per adult fell a modest 2 percent, but it had jumped 59 percent before the crisis.
Even Japanese and Germans, who weren’t big borrowers in the years before the crisis, cut debt – 4 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
“We don’t want to take out a loan,” says Maria Schoenberg, 45, of Frankfurt, Germany, explaining why she and her husband, a rheumatologist, decided to rent after a recent move instead of borrowing to buy. “We’re terrified of doing that.”
Such attitudes are rife when it has rarely been cheaper to borrow around the world.
“A whole new generation of adults has come of age in a time of diminished expectations,” says Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, the fourth- largest U.S. bank. “They’re not likely to take on debt like those before them.”
Or spend as much.
After adjusting for inflation, Americans increased their spending in the five years after the crisis at one-quarter the rate before the crisis, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. French spending barely budged. In the U.K., spending dropped. The British spent 3 percent less last year than they did five years earlier, in 2007.
High unemployment has played a role. But economists say the financial crisis, and the government debt crisis that started in Europe a year later, has spooked even people who can afford to splurge to cut back.
Arnaud Reze, 36, owns a home in Nantes, France, has piled up money in savings accounts and stocks, and has a government job that guarantees 75 percent of his pay in retirement. But he fears the pension guarantee won’t be kept. So he’s stopped buying coffee at cafes and cut back on lunches with colleagues and saved in numerous other ways. “Little stupid things that I would buy left and right … I don’t buy anymore,” he says.
Even the rich are spending cautiously.
Five years ago, Mike Cockrell, chief financial officer at Sanderson Farms, a large U.S. poultry producer in Laurel, Miss., had just paid off a mortgage and was looking forward to the extra spending money. Then Lehman collapsed, and he decided to save it instead.
“I watched the news of the stock market going down 100, 200 points a day, and I was glad I had cash,” he says, recalling the steep drops in the Dow Jones industrial average then. “That strategy will not change.”
The wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households are saving 30 percent of their take- home pay, triple what they were saving in 2008, according to a July report from American Express Publishing and Harrison Group, a research firm.
After years of saving more and shedding debt, the good news is that many people have repaired their personal finances.
Americans have slashed their credit card debt to 2002 levels. In the U.K., personal bank loans, not including mortgages, are no larger than they were in 1999. In addition, home prices in some countries are rising.
So more people have the capacity to borrow, spend and invest more. But will they?
Sahoko Tanabe of Tokyo, 63, lost money in Japan’s stock market crash more than two decades ago, but she’s buying again. “Abenomics,” a mix of fiscal and monetary stimulus named for Japan’s new prime minister, has ignited Japanese stocks, and she doesn’t want to miss out. “You’re bound to fail if you have a pessimistic attitude,” she says.
But for every Tanabe, there seem to be more people like Madeleine Bosco, the Californian who ditched many of her credit cards. “All of a sudden you look at all these things you’re buying that you don’t need,” she says.
Attitudes like Bosco’s will make for a better economy eventually – safer and more stable – but won’t trigger the jobs and wage gains that are needed to make economies healthy now.
“The further you get away from the carnage in `08-’09, the memories fade,” says Stephen Roach, former chief economist at investment bank Morgan Stanley, who now teaches at Yale. “But does it return to the leverage and consumer demand we had in the past and make things hunky dory? The answer is no.”
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AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, AP researcher Judith Ausuebel and AP writers Nirmala George in New Delhi, Joe McDonald in Beijing, Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo, Carlo Piovano in London, Sarah DiLorenzo in Paris, David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany, and Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed to this report.
Results of the AP/GfK poll can be seen online at HTTP://WWW.AP-GFKPOLL.COM .
You can reach Bernard Condon on Twitter at HTTP://TWITTER.COM/BERNARDFCONDON
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