Many people find it difficult to make decisions about their finances. The majority of Swedes understand financial terms but are not knowledgeable about how these concepts impact their own finances. Finansinspektionen (FI) is releasing a report today that evaluates the authority’s work with financial education and identifies a number of areas where deficient financial literacy could impose significant risks on the consumer.
Amortisation requirements, the LTI ratio, and the LTV cap are macroprudential policy tools that are used in Sweden and many other countries. But what are the potential effects of these borrower-based measures? To answer to this question, Finansinspektionen commissioned two expert reports on the topic.
Fraud is a major and expanding societal problem that fosters organised crime. FI supervises that payment service providers follow the provisions set out in the Payment Services Act that aim to prevent fraud. Payment service providers do a lot to prevent their payments services from being used for fraud, but this problem is still growing.
Households continue to be under pressure from both higher interest rates and other costs. This is evident in FI’s mortgage report. The report looks at new mortgagors during the autumn of 2023. We can see that there are fewer mortgagors than in previous years. Home buyers also bought slightly less expensive homes and borrowed slightly less. Total lending to households has stagnated, but despite this household indebtedness continues to be high.
More than half of Swedes who traded in cryptocertificates over the past six years have lost money on their investments. This is despite the underlying market increasing by up to 500 percent during the studied period. This is shown in a new analysis by FI that examines Swedes' trading in cryptocertificates.