Mortgage market turmoil. A painful housing slump. Economic concerns don't get any worse than they are these days in America, right?

Wrong. Try coming to Britain. After a decade of unprecedented economic growth, this nation of perhaps the world's most overextended borrowers might finally be forced to pay the piper.

High debt "really snuck up on me without me realizing how bad things were getting," said Erire Obano, 40, a songwriter who had to sell her London home this month after she remortgaged her property - twice - in order to pay her rising debts.

As she fell behind on mortgage payments that rose from $1,200 a month five years ago to $4,000 a month today, "I was living off credit cards there for a while and it wasn't a good thing," she said. "The debts just grew like crazy."

Today, British consumers owe $2.7 trillion on credit cards, mortgages and other consumer loans - more than the value of all the goods and services produced by its economy in a year, according to accounting firm Grant Thornton.

"Personal debt exceeding Britain's GDP is a worrying milestone in our buy-now-and-pay-later culture," said Martin Bamford, a personal finance adviser and author in Surrey, England.

Indeed, personal debt in Britain is growing by $1 million every two minutes, according to http://www.creditaction.org.uk, a nonprofit financial education group. The average household now owes an amount equal to 166 percent of its annual disposable income, 30 percent higher than in the United States.

As home prices tripled, with the average house price recently smashing through the $600,000 mark in London, owners borrowed against that value to fuel consumer spending. Investment rolled in as the city prepared to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, and $2 million bonuses were handed out in the booming financial sector.

Then the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the U.S. sent ripples around the world.

When the country's fifth-largest mortgage lender, Northern Rock, asked the Bank of England for emergency funding, panicked customers lined up outside branches to withdraw their funds.

"It's been a rocky week for Britain's retail banks and their customers," said James Edsberg, a partner in the retail strategy firm Lighthouse Global. "The Northern Rock bank has been the first to suffer from the impact of the global credit crunch on this side of the Atlantic."

The number of people declaring bankruptcy jumped 28 percent in the year ended this June, while the number of home repossessions soared 30 percent.