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to balance the books. plus, with the cost of living soaring around the world, global debt has hit a record $300 trillion. so we ll hear from the boss of europe s leading debt collection agency about how it balances the need to recover cash for its clients with people s ability to pay. wherever you rejoining me from around the world. once again, a big hello and a warm welcome to the show. getting old is something that happens to all of us. butjust how are we as individuals and as a society going to pay for it? this year, france has seen high profile and often violent demonstrations about government plans to address exactly that question. but the french aren t alone, across europe as well as in the us and japan and many other countries. our populations are getting older at a time when the global economic system has undergone a series of major shocks. since the second world war global life expectancy has risen steadily, while birth rates fall. in 2019 before the pandemic, ....
To balance the books. plus, with the cost of living soaring around the world, global debt has hit a record $300 trillion. so we ll hear from the boss of europe s leading debt collection agency about how it balances the need to recover cash for its clients with people s ability to pay. wherever you rejoining me from around the world. once again, a big hello and a warm welcome to the show. getting old is something that happens to all of us. butjust how are we as individuals and as a society going to pay for it? this year, france has seen high profile and often violent demonstrations about government plans to address exactly that question. but the french aren t alone, across europe as well as in the us and japan and many other countries. our populations are getting ....
More for their own retirement. so there s there s not one solution here. there s got to be many, many solutions that all add up to addressing this problem. otherwise, this problem is going to overwhelm us. mark zandi, thank you very much. sure. my pleasure. thank you for the opportunity. i m going to throw a numberat you. $300 trillion. it s a huge sum. and according to the financial information firm s&p global, it s how much debt the world holds. it s at record levels nearly three times the size of what the global economy produces in a year. and some are warning it will only get worse because of the impact of rising inflation and interest rates. so how much of a struggle does all of that make it for us to pay our bills, loans and mortgages? i ve been speaking to the boss of sweden s interim europe s biggest debt collection agency, andres rubio, thank you very much ....
We have not yet seen that lack of payment transfer over into things like mortgages and consumer credit to a degree, although you ve seen stress build up in the financial system over the last two years. are you finding that the economic environment that we find ourselves in now, high inflation, high interest rates, is making the debt problem worse? so, the answer is yes. what we see is over time and across countries, are comparative of who is in a more difficult situation and who isn t. when we look across all of europe, it s absolutely getting worse across the board, but it s very different by different countries, just as an example. the uk is probably the most difficult company or sorry country right now in terms of our ability to collect on past claims. not surprisingly, the uk is the highest, the most impacted and the first impacted by the energy crisis. it has the highest percentage of respondents in our recent survey as to how many firms are receiving inordinately high wage demand ....
And even large companies in the uk probably being most affected. the rest of europe is at different speeds, but moving in the same direction. why might certain countries be more exposed than others other than how the cost of living crisis is impacting them? does it also have to do with when they raise interest rates how long that takes to feed through? absolutely. i think different countries have different levels of banking and non banking. different countries have more variable sized mortgages, more fixed rate mortgages. so it takes a while in the uk as an example, it s highly variable. and when you say there s a fixed rate mortgage in the uk, it s not fixed forever. like the concept in the united states, it s fixed for two or three years on average, i think it s less than two years. so it takes time for those interest rates to flow in. and what we have is a consumer across all of europe that s seen their food, their energy grow up and now their car loan ....