SEOUL Tony Gwynn Padres Jersey , Aug. 28 (Xinhua) -- Household debts vulnerable to repayment because of low credit and low income rose in the past year, boosting worries about the debt-servicing capability amid the expected interest rate hike, a central bank report said Monday.
The so-called vulnerable household debts reached 79.5 trillion won (71 billion U.S. dollars) as of the end of March, according to the Bank of Korea (BOK) report submitted to the National Assembly.
It was up 6 trillion won compared with 73.5 trillion won tallied at the end of 2015.
The vulnerable debt refers to those extended to households with low credit and low income which borrowed money from at least three financial institutions.
The record-low borrowing costs had encouraged households to spend money and purchase home with borrowed money.
The BOK lowered its benchmark interest rate from 3.25 percent in July 2012 to an all-time low of 1.25 percent in June last year.
The debt-servicing burden for the vulnerable households was forecast to get heavier on expectations that the BOK would raise its policy rate in the foreseeable future.
The U.S. Federal Reserve lifted its benchmark rate to a range of 1.00-1.125 percent, nearing the BOK's policy rate.
The so-called dangerous household debts, which have the ratio of debt repayment to disposable income at more than 40 percent Cory Spangenberg Youth Jersey , came in at 62 trillion won as of the end of 2016, up 15.6 trillion won from a year earlier.
The ratio of household debts to the country's gross domestic product (GDP) came to 91 percent as of the end of 2015. It was 18.6 percentage points higher than the average ratio recorded by member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
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SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 18 (Xinhua) -- Tobacco companies have known for decades that without counseling "nicotine replacement therapy" or NTR Wil Myers Youth Jersey , used by consumers to complement smoking, hardly helps smokers quit, according to a study out of the United States. What's more, American cigarette makers embraced NTR as a business opportunity.
Combined with counseling, nicotine patches, gum Rollie Fingers Youth Jersey , lozenges, inhalers or nasal sprays - together known as NRT - came into play in 1984 as prescription medicine. In 1996, at the urging of pharmaceutical companies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed those products to be sold over-the-counter.
The tobacco industry once viewed nicotine patches and gum as a threat to their cigarette sales.
However, with formerly secret internal documents known as the "Tobacco Papers," dated between 1960 and 2010 from the seven major tobacco companies operating in the United States Dave Winfield Youth Jersey , researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, revealed that cigarette makers had started investing in alternative forms of nicotine delivery as early as the 1950s, but stopped short because people largely regarded nicotine as harmful, and such products might have attracted the attention of FDA regulators.
Published this week in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), the study titled "Tobacco Industry Research on Nicotine Replacement Therapy: 'If Anyone Is Going to Take Away Our Business It Should Be Us'" found that in 1987 Tony Gwynn Youth Jersey , three years after FDA first approved nicotine gum as a quitting aid, the tide had turned on the public perception of nicotine; and that by 1992, the tobacco industry had determined that patches and gum by themselves do not help smokers quit.
For more than a decade, the companies did not act on this knowledge out of fear of FDA regulation. But once the federal agency started regulating cigarettes in 2009, they went all out in their bid to develop and sell NRT. The Tobacco Papers reveal that companies conjectured that their new nicotine products could successfully compete with pharmaceutical NRT and they set the goal of gaining market control of all products containing nicotine.
"It was surprising to discover the industry came to view NRT as just another product," Dorie Apollonio Cory Spangenberg Womens Jersey , associate professor in clinical pharmacy and lead author of the study, was quoted as saying in a UCSF news release. "The tobacco companies want people to get nicotine - and they're open-minded about how they get it."
Smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths every year in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and another 16 million Americans live with a smoking-related disease.
The costs of such illnesses total more than 300 billion U.S. dollars each year, when including both costs of direct medical care and lost productivity due to secondhand smoke exposure.
Clinical trials show that NRT can help people quit smoking Wil Myers Womens Jersey , but only if used in conjunction with counseling and in tapering doses.
Over-the-counter availability of NRT made it easy for smokers to get a nicotine fix in non-smoking environments like offices and inside airplanes, with the net result that they were less likely to quit. And given that NRT products are widely available, one of the questions is whether they encourage nicotine abuse.