The Next Collapse?
1 min readJun 1, 2013
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Floyd Norris, Off the Charts: Sign of Excess?
Margin debt in the United States — money borrowed against securities in brokerage accounts — has risen to its highest level ever, at $384 billion, surpassing the previous peak of $381 billion set in July 2007. Historically, rising levels of margin debt have been seen as a sign of speculation. Relative to the size of the economy, margin debt is far from setting a record, but it has climbed to levels seen only twice before during the past half century. In each previous case the increase came during bull markets that ended with rapid falls in share prices.
