Viral debt: Origins, pathways, and consequences

Household debts have swept across our societies, circulating rapidly and widely with a high rate of infection. As the COVID-19 pandemic set in, we began to realise just how widespread and consequential household debts had and would become; and, as the cost-of-living crisis intensified in the aftermath, we began to understand why our usual ways of examining debt had missed the mark. We needed to understand what made our societies so vulnerable to increased debt loads, why some households were much more susceptible than others, how the debt loads spread like a virus, and what treatments became available to prevent them, on the one hand, or to ameliorate their negative effects, on the other.