The “belt-tightening” archetype was by far the most common of the four, accounting for roughly half of the deleveraging episodes. If today’s economies were to follow this path, they would experience six to seven years of deleveraging, in which the debt-
to-GDP ratio declines by around 25 percent. Deleveraging would begin two years after the start of the crisis, and GDP would contract for the first two to three years of deleveraging, and then start growing again (Exhibit 4).