Ticking time bomb: unsecured debt is a major risk – Alec Hogg, Dave Woollam

In an article warning that the United Nations has unsecured lending on its list of concerns, Malcolm Rees points out that there is much as R208bn in outstanding unsecured and short-term credit in South Africa, accounting for 11% of all outstanding credit.  "To put that in context, the nominal value of outstanding unsecured credit has grown near six-fold since the start of the lending boom in 2008. In that year, it represented just 3% of all outstanding credit," Rees writes. BizNews editor-in-chief Alec Hogg picks up the threads of this story with micro-lending expert Dave Woollam. In this podcast, Hogg and Woollam discuss how unsecured debt is a major risk to the economy. – Jackie Cameron

There is a R450bn pile of unsecured debt that might come back and really bite the South African economy. This is the warning from BizNews editor-in-chief Alec Hogg and his guest Dave Woollam, a financial services fundi who has worked in the banking sector and blew the whistle that there was danger brewing in African Bank Investments Limited (Abil). The latter was put into curatorship in 2014.

Microlender Abil was one of the hottest Johannesburg-listed stocks in the early part of this century, paying steady dividends and enjoying a rising share price on the back of unsecured lending.

In this podcast, Hogg and Woollam explore the continued growth of unsecured lending in South Africa, which taps lower-income earners for high interest debt. 

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