This excerpt originally appeared in Bloomberg on April 10, 2012.

Finance professor Anthony Sanders, who spoke on a panel today after DeMarco’s speech at the Brookings Institution, said reducing debt would not help many borrowers who have seen a long-term decline in their economic circumstances.

“The only fraction of the population it might help are households that have a temporary decline in income due to either job loss of one of the members or they’ve had to cut back in hours,” said Sanders, who teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.