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It's not just there -- Fed President Dennis Lockhart has said the same thing about the United States.

Lockhart wrote..

Deleveraging going forward
For the economy as a whole, debt relative to GDP has barely changed.

While the private sector—households and businesses—has made notable progress in lowering its debt burden, discussions of how to reduce public debt have only just begun. The government still needs to introduce major policy changes to put public debt on a sustainable path. Demographic trends, which I referenced earlier, will make public debt reduction even more challenging.

It is necessary that the process of deleveraging plays itself out, which may take several more years. When economies are deleveraging they cannot grow as rapidly as they might otherwise. It is obvious that as consumers reduce spending they divert more of their incomes to paying off debt. This shift in consumer behavior increases the amount of capital available for financing investment. But higher rates of business investment are not likely to fully offset weakness in consumer spending for some time, as businesses continue to grapple with uncertainties about the future.