How has household financial risk aversion changed?

We look at the situations of the United States, the euro zone and France. It is well known that when households have high financial risk aversion, risky assets must be held by financial intermediaries that absorb the risk, which raises serious problems in regulating these intermediaries. We therefore analyse changes in the structure of financial assets held by households, making institutional investors transparent. We try to understand the causes of the change in this structure, as well as the related change in households’ financial risk aversion. We see that: Household financial risk aversion fluctuates , but has not risen as a trend in the United States; It has risen since the subprime crisis in the euro zone and France (less than in the euro zone as a whole); This reinforces the need to intermediate the financing of the economy in the euro zone, hence the regulatory problems mentioned above.