NYT: Families, Deep in Debt, Facing Pain of Growing Interest Rates

[stopbush]

And once again, the poor and lower middle class get suckered into a financial scheme that assures them they'll never really get ahead while the well-to-do laugh all the way to the bank...

(snip)
By several measures, Americans are more indebted than ever. Through the first quarter, they owed nearly $9 trillion in home mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, home equity loans and other forms of personal borrowing — accumulating nearly 40 percent of this total in just four years, according to published Federal Reserve data. But most of the debt is at fixed interest rates. Thus it will be unaffected initially as the central bank begins its much expected quarter-point increases in the so-called federal funds rate, now at a 46-year low of 1 percent. The federal funds rate, in turn, influences the interest rate cost of most household and commercial debt.

Only one-fifth of the $9 trillion in total household debt, or $1.8 trillion, is borrowed at variable rates. Variable rates, like those that the Diffenderfers pay on their four credit cards, often track what the Fed does, which means they are likely to rise one-quarter of a percentage point over the next few weeks. The immediate cost for the nation's households as a result of this process could be as much as $4.5 billion, including the initial $35 increase in the Diffenderfers' monthly credit card bill.

(snip)

Upper income families, on the other hand - that is, families with more than $80,000 in annual income - are more likely to have fixed rate debt, particularly mortgages, and to owe relatively little on their credit cards. What variable rate debt they do have is usually at lower interest rates than lower income people. Lower income people, as a result, are 10 times more likely than upper income people to be devoting 40 percent or more of their income to debt repayment, the Economic Policy Institute reports. In addition, upper income people are the nation's biggest savers, and a rate increase raises the return on their interest-bearing securities.

Complete article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/28/business/28DEBT.html?hp

[DocSavage]

1. Who is responsible

As harsh as it may sound, the only people responsible for using credit cards and taking out loans with bad rates are the people doing it.

I make 36K a year, 2 boys, single parent. I am very carefull and read every line of any loan application that I fill out. I buy what I can pay for and use the credit cards very infrequently. We go without, but in the long run that will be benificial to us.

If you are going to blame banks, credit card companies, or the govt, you are just taking the personal responsibility out of the equation.

[Centre_Left]

2. Reserve some blame for the Fed (no pun intended)

The Fed has willingly facilicated this sort of irrational behavior on the part of consumers for the purposes of economic "stabilization."

[IrateCitizen]

3. There's plenty of responsibility to go around...

I responded to your "personal responsibility" schtick on the other thread, Doc Savage, and I'll respond here as well.

I don't deny one bit that those falling into debt are to blame for their fate. However, I think that to place all of the blame on them without considering the outside factors that lead to that situation is terribly short-sighted, and more closely resembles the GOP mantra of "personal responsibility" that ignores larger societal influences.

Going back to the post-WWII boom, the US economy has concerned itself with a neverending growth in consumption on the part of its citizens. One of the primary weapons employed in this effort has been the advertising industry. Since the products for people to consume were not urgent needs/wants, the advertisers had to manufacture those wants, and create the belief among the populace that they actually WERE urgent.

The problem was, there was no way to keep income increasing at the same rate as consumption. So, the wonderful idea of consumer credit was unleashed on the masses.

Like I said, this was apparent during the post-WWII boom. Here is a quick passage from The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (published in 1958), page 159:
An increase in consumer debt is all but implicit in the process by which wants are now synthesized. Advertising and emulation, the two dependent sources of desire, work across the society. They work on those who can afford and those who cannot.... The process of persuading people to incur debt, and the arrangements for them to do so, are as much a part of modern production as the making of the goods and the nurturing of the wants. The Puritan ethos was not abandoned. It was merely overwhelmed by the massive power of modern merchandizing.
Viewing this process as a whole, we should expect that every increase in consumption will bring a further increase -- possibly a more than proportional one -- in consumer debt. Our march to higher living standards will be paced, as a matter of necessity, by an ever deeper plunge into debt.

Personally, I am glad I have come to realize the wisdom of my parents and grandparents surrounding the haunting spectre of debt. My wife and I are now in the process of saving while at the same time paying down what debt we have outside of our mortgage (and we pay extra principle on that as well). Personally, I have no designs of engaging in the rat race propelled by modern advertising culture. However, in this sense, I also realize that I am the exception rather than the rule, as are you. With the insiduous nature of advertising, its ability to manufacture wants and manipulate behavior, we will not see a stop to this insanity until we are able to curb the excesses of banking institutions and predatory lenders. Everything we are seeing in this regard is really just a manifestation of an economy that decided over a half-century ago to concern itself with production over all else, along with the accompanying consumption patterns necessary toward maintaining said production.

Personal responsibility bears some blame, that much is certain. But there are also plenty of others to share some of the blame as well, and ignoring that reality will not help solve the much larger problem.