STEPHEN CRANSTON: Consumers in the soup
Those who are more dependent on income than assets are having a tougher time with a higher tax burden
I am surprised that Momentum has the luxury of spending time on external research, given that it is still in the very early stages of financial recovery. But in the past two weeks, it has put out two reports in conjunction with Unisa, or as it rather pompously says, through a "purposeful collaboration". Momentum has more recently introduced a separate consumer financial vulnerability index. It is no surprise that these reports have a similar theme — the consumer is in trouble. The household index shows the net worth of SA households fell by R449.8bn (perhaps too precise an amount to be fully credible) last year. And 6.3% of real household wealth went up in smoke — the worst result since the global financial crisis, which eroded by 15.6% in the year to March 2009. But I find it reassuring that just a small part of the decline comes from more debt that people are taking on — R21.2bn. In fact, the overwhelming majority, R428.6bn, is the decline in the value of their assets, primarily b...
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