The 2007-2008 financial crisis has made it painfully obvious that markets may quickly turn illiquid. Moreover, recent experience has shown that distress and lack of active trading can jump 'around' between seemingly unconnected parts of the financial system contributing to transforming isolated...

We provide a model with endogenous portfolios of secured and unsecured household debt. Secured debt is collateralized by durables whereas unsecured debt can be discharged in bankruptcy procedures. We show that the model matches the main quantitative characteristics of observed wealth and debt...