The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q1 2020

[marmar]

The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q1 2020
by Wolf Richter • May 9, 2020

How are consumers positioned going into the crisis?
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.


Most of the first quarter was still the Good Times, but in later February and early March it hit the fan, as markets were crashing. In mid-March lockdowns started to roll across the country, and the layoffs by the tens of millions commenced. So how were consumers positioned going into this crisis? Many of them, up to their eyeballs in debt.

Consumer debt – student loans, auto loans, and revolving credit such as credit cards and personal loans but excluding housing-related debts such as mortgages and HELOCs – jumped by $153 billion at the end of the first quarter, compared to Q1 a year earlier, or by 3.8%, to $4.15 trillion (not seasonally adjusted), according to Federal Reserve data:



In March, the problems already became apparent. On a seasonally adjusted basis (the above is not seasonally adjusted), consumer credit fell 0.3% in March from February, and except for December 2015, when a large statistical adjustment was made, this was the first month-to-month decline since the Great Recession. ..........(more)

https://wolfstreet.com/2020/05/09/the-state-of-the-american-debt-slaves-q1-2020/

[alwaysinasnit]

1. I get the impression that there is going to be a huge wave of bankruptcies in the not-too-distant

future, unless something happens legislatively to help underwater consumers.

[erronis]

4. Didn't the (r)epuglicons make personal bankruptcies just about impossible?

The REALLY love to see pain.

[alwaysinasnit]

5. The biggest hurdle for bankrupcy petitions is a means test. That is how the Repugs made it harder to

file for Chapter 7 protection.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/chapter-7-bankruptcy-means-test-eligibility-29907.html

[LakeArenal]

2. Wish I could rec 1000 times.

[EarnestPutz]

3. While I agree that consumer debt is a growing problem, I've got to....

....complain when someone uses a graph like this one. It visually exaggerates the change over time by manipulating the vertical scale on the left. A change from 2200 to 4200 is made to look like less than two to over twenty. If you picture this graph being extended downward, with the dark bars going down to a baseline of zero billions, it would still illustrate the problem, but more truthfully.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

7. Thank you for pointing that out. It's a classic tactic from "How to Lie With Statistics." NT

[Warpy]

6. Anyone who thinks this is sustainable probably voted for Big Dummy

At some point, people are simply squeezed so hard they pop. At that point they thumb their noses at the creditors and hit the road. And at that point, the whole topheavy mess comes tumbling down, taking the banking system and jobs along with it.

No amount of tweaking is going to prevent this. It needs radical, systemic change and no one in either party will have the guts for that until things are desperate and angry crowds are assembling.