Surging Household Debt Is Forcing More New Yorkers To Rely On Food Pantries

As US stock benchmarks smash through one record high after the next – a central-bank driven phenomenon that disproportionately benefits the wealthy at the expense of the middle-class and working poor - booming credit-card debt is forcing more New Yorkers to seek assistance at the city’s food pantries this holiday season, according to a report in the New York Post.

As revealed by the latest New York Fed data – which we cited earlier this month - US household debt has grown by $605 billion in the 12 months through the end of the third quarter. Q3 marked the thirteenth consecutive month of expansion as $116 billion was added to consumers’ aggregate debt pile. And while credit debt is climbing aggressively – it jumped 3.1% in Q3 alone - mortgages, student loans and auto loans are also swelling. To put this in context, consumers’ aggregate debt burden, which is just under $13 trillion, is equivalent to 66% of GDP, and has also surpassed its peak from the run-up to the crisis.

The result is that more New Yorkers are forced to rely on food pantries while dodging calls from debt collectors.

“We’ve seen a large increase in credit card debt for the population we are serving in New York,” said Laine Rolong, senior manager at the financial empowerment program at the Food Bank for New York City.

 

Rolong noted that many food pantries it serves in the city have had to turn hungry people away lately in the face of rising demand for limited emergency food stocks.

 

One expert says the credit card binge reminds him of the buildup to the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. And this, say other experts, could be the telltale sign of an imminent recession.

Furthermore, the Fed data reveal a troubling rise in delinquencies for credit-card and auto debt that has befuddled central bankers (though regular working people might be able to think of a few factors driving this trend).

Unsurprisingly, this is forcing consumers to resort to patterns of behavior that debt-relief experts say they haven’t seen since the crisis.

“I would say this is very similar to what I saw 10 years ago - people using their credit cards quite a bit,” said Kevin Gallegos, a senior vice president at Freedom Debt Relief, a debt settlement company for consumers.

 

Back then, when total household debt was heading toward a peak of $12.68 trillion (which ended in disaster), debt-burdened consumers were addicted to cards — often those offering a tantalizing zero-percent monthly interest rate for as long as 12 months or more.

 

That strategy, now back in vogue, often ends in tears as the debt piles up. “By the time the consumer has moved their balances to the fourth card at zero percent, companies eventually cut them off for the next card,” said Gallegos.

 

The fallout can be dreadful. “We’ve had clients tell us they are on the verge of suicide, their marriages are breaking up, or ‘I don’t have enough to put food on my table,’” said Gallegos. “We hear sad stories all the time.”

Gallegos’s words echo a warning issued by the New York Fed three months ago.

“While relatively low, credit card delinquency flows climbed notably over the past year,” said Andrew Haughwout, senior vice president at the New York Fed. “This is occurring within the context of loosening lending standards, as borrowers with lower credit scores recover their ability to access credit cards. The current state of credit card delinquency flows can be an early indicator of future trends and we will closely monitor the degree to which this uptick is predictive of further consumer distress.”

What makes this trend particularly troubling is that, if the last crisis taught consumers anything, it’s that they can’t depend on the federal government to bail them out if things go south in a hurry. The Fed and Congress will probably stick to the tried-and-true playbook of bailing out the banks, while millions of Americans are forced from their homes and into impecunity in a retread of the financial crisis. Only this time, it’ll be subprime credit card debt and auto debt – not mortgages – that sink the economy.

The Coming Debt Reckoning

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

American workers, as a whole, are facing a disagreeable disorder.  Their debt burdens are increasing.  Their incomes are stagnating.

There are many reasons why.  In truth, it would take several large volumes to chronicle all of them.  But when you get down to the ‘lick log’ of it all, the disorder stems from decades of technocratic intervention that have stripped away any semblance of a free functioning, self-correcting economy.

The financial system circa 2017, and the economy that supports it, has been stretched to the breaking point.  Shortsighted fiscal and monetary policies have propagated it.  The result is a failing financial order that has become near intolerable for all but the gravy supping political class and their cronies.

Take consumer spending.  This is the primary driver of the U.S. economy.  Yet it requires vast amounts of credit.  In fact, American consumers presently hold $1 trillion in revolving credit.  At the same time, they have nowhere near the income needed to finance these debts, let alone pay them off.

Remember, the flipside of credit is debt.  Obviously, the divergence of increasing debt and stagnating incomes is a condition that cannot go on forever.  But it can go on much longer than any sensible person would consider possible.

Debt Slaves

If you haven’t noticed, the financial services industry is extremely accomplished at compelling people to go whole hog into debt.  Moreover, the entire fiat based financial system, which depends on ever increasing issuances of debt, hinges on it.  Just a slight contraction of credit, like late 2008, and the whole debt repayment structure breaks down.

On an individual basis, there are only so many credit cards that can be maxed out before the shell game ends.  Wolf Richter, of Wolf Street, recently clarified the relationship between the economy and deep consumer debt:

“The US economy is fueled by credit.  Americans turning themselves into debt slaves makes it tick.  Take it away, and what little growth there is – nearly zero in the first quarter – will dissipate into ambient air altogether.  So it’s time to take the pulse of our American debt slaves.

“In a new study, life insurer and financial services provider Northwestern Mutual found that 45 percent of Americans that have debt spend ‘up to half of their monthly income on debt repayment.’  Those are the true debt slaves.

“Excluding mortgage debt, Americans carry an average debt of $37,000.  Of them, 47 percent carry $25,000 or more, and more than 10 percent carry $100,000 or more in debt, excluding mortgage debt.

“Most of them expect to get out of debt before they die, but 14 percent expect to be in debt ‘for the rest of their lives.”’

The Coming Debt Reckoning

Consumers with elevated debt levels are playing a high risk game.  They are one job loss or illness away from losing it all.  Even without such difficult life events, the compounding interest of massive amounts of debt relentlessly pile up like straw upon a camel’s back.  Eventually the breaking point is crossed.

The process may be subtle at first.  Later it’s abrupt.  Here we turn to a brief dialogue from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, for a succinct explanation of the process of going broke:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said.  “Gradually and then suddenly.”

By our estimation, the gradual trickle toward bankruptcy for many Americans is giving way to the sudden deluge.  On an individual basis, greater amounts of debt may be a temporary solution to a debt problem.  But greater amounts of debt gradually compound to a sudden bankruptcy.

First-quarter GDP, reported last Friday, came in at an annualized rate of just 0.7 percent.  Of this, personal consumption increased just 0.3 percent.

Up and down, in and out, of the economy, consumers are struggling.  Some are attempting to tighten their belts.  Others are at the end of their rope.  Is it any surprise that retailers are shuttering stores at a record clip?

Obviously, the effects of consumer retrenchments will spread out beyond just retail.  Commercial real estate, manufacturing, shipping and transportation, automotive, oil and gas – you name it.  A coordinated supply glut, fueled by excess debt, is upon us.

Make of it what you will.  By our estimation a debt reckoning is coming, and that doesn’t even account for government debt.  What better time than now to get your financial house in order?

Debt-pocalypse Beckons As US Consumer Bankruptcies Do Something They Haven't Done In 7 Years

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

When debt grows much faster than GDP for an extended period of time, it is inevitable that a good portion of that debt will start to go bad at some point.  We witnessed a perfect example of this in 2008, and now it is starting to happen again.  Commercial bankruptcies have been rising on a year-over-year basis since late 2015, and this is something that I have written about previously, but now consumer bankruptcies are also increasing.  In fact, we have just witnessed U.S. consumer bankruptcies do something that they haven’t done in nearly 7 years.  The following comes from Wolf Richter…

US bankruptcy filings by consumers rose 5.4% in January, compared to January last year, to 52,421 according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. In December, they’d already risen 4.5% from a year earlier. This was the first time that consumer bankruptcies increased back-to-back since 2010.

However, business bankruptcies began to surge in November 2015 and continued surging on a year-over-year basis in 2016, to reach a full-year total of 37,823 filings, up 26% from the prior year and the highest since 2014.

Of course consumer bankruptcies are still much lower than they were during the last financial crisis, but what this could mean is that we have reached a turning point.

For years, the Federal Reserve has been encouraging reckless borrowing and spending by pushing interest rates to ultra-low levels.  Unfortunately, this created an absolutely enormous debt bubble, and now that debt bubble is beginning to burst.  Here is more from Wolf Richter…

The dizzying borrowing by consumers and businesses that the Fed with its ultra-low interest rates and in its infinite wisdom has purposefully encouraged to fuel economic growth, if any, and to inflate asset prices, has caused debt to pile up. That debt is now eating up cash flows needed for other things, and this is causing pressures, just when interest rates have begun to rise, which will make refinancing this debt more expensive and, for a rising number of consumers and businesses, impossible. And so, the legacy of this binge will haunt the economy – and creditors – for years to come.

Despite all of the economic optimism that is out there right now, the truth is that U.S. consumers are tapped out.

If the U.S. economy truly was doing great, major retailers would not be closing hundreds of stores.  Sears, Macy’s and a whole host of other big retailers are closing stores because those stores are losing money.  It truly is a “retail apocalypse“, and this trend is not going to turn around until U.S. consumers start to become healthier financially.

We also see signs of trouble in the auto sales numbers.  Compared to 2016, sales were way down in January this year…

Compared to January last year, car sales collapsed for all three US automakers, and the largest Japanese automakers didn’t do much better:

• GM -21.1%


• Ford -17.5%


• Fiat Chrysler -35.8%


• Toyota -19.9%


• Honda -10.7%


• Nissan -9.0%

For all automakers combined, car sales sagged 12.2% from a year ago.

A lot of attention is given to our 20 trillion dollar national debt, and rightly so, but a similar amount of attention should be paid to the fact that U.S. households are collectively more than 12 trillion dollars in debt.

About two-thirds of the nation is essentially living paycheck to paycheck.  Most families really struggle to pay the bills from month to month, and all it would take is a major event such as a job loss or a significant illness to plunge them into financial oblivion.

In America today we are told that the secret to success is a college education, but most young Americans have to go deep into debt to afford such an education.

As a result, most college graduates start out life in the “real world” with a mountain of debt.  And since many of them never find the “good jobs” that they were promised, repayment of that debt becomes a very big issue.  In fact, the Wall Street Journal has discovered that student loan repayment rates are much worse than we were being told…

Last Friday, the Education Department released a memo saying that it had overstated student loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools and provided updated numbers.

When The Wall Street Journal analyzed the new numbers, the data revealed that the Department previously had inflated the repayment rates for 99.8% of all colleges and trade schools in the country.

The new analysis shows that at more than 1,000 colleges and trade schools, or about a quarter of the total, at least half the students had defaulted or failed to pay down at least $1 on their debt within seven years.

If you do find yourself deep in debt, a lot of families have found success by following a plan that was pioneered by author Dave Ramsey.  His “Debt Snowball Plan” really works, but you have to be committed to it.

Getting out of debt can be tremendously freeing.  So many people spend so many sleepless nights consumed by financial stress, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Most of us have had to go into debt for some reason or another, and not all debt is bad debt.  For example, very few of us would be able to own a home without getting a mortgage, and usually mortgages come with very low interest rates these days.

But other forms of debt (such as credit card debt or payday loans) can be financially crippling.  When it comes to eliminating debt, it is often a really good idea to start with the most toxic forms of debt first.

It has been said that the borrower is the servant of the lender, and you don’t want to spend the best years of your life making somebody else rich.

Whether economic conditions turn out to be good or bad in 2017, the truth is that each one of us should be trying to do what we can to get out of debt.

Unfortunately, a lot of people never seem to learn from the past, and I have a feeling that both consumer and commercial bankruptcies will continue to rise throughout the rest of this year.

Are Debt-Laden American Consumers About To Get Crushed By Higher Interest Rates?

American consumers love debt, wall street loves securitizing that debt and collecting massive fees for selling it and pension funds, with no viable alternative investments courtesy of accommodative Fed policies, love buying that debt for the extra 25bps of yield it provides.  It"s a "win, win, win", right?

Well, until it"s not.  While real median incomes in the U.S. have been stagnant for almost a
decade, real household personal consumption has continued its steady
rise as American"s have simply replaced lost income with new debt.  But,
with household leverage near all-time highs and interest rates on the
rise, we suspect this could all end very badly for the U.S. consumer and those pension funds that were forced to "stretch for yield."

Per a Bloomberg article posted today, the average U.S. household is carrying roughly $133,000 worth of debt, spread between mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans and the newly-popular, crowd-funded, personal loans. 

To be sure, while staggering, this is nothing new as the growth of U.S. consumer debt has basically gone exponential since the early 90"s.

Meanwhile, real median household income has yet to recover to pre-recession 2007 levels.

That said, up until now, the cost of the staggering increases in notional consumer debt outstanding has been offset by lower interest rates.  As a result, historically low rates have have kept the ratio of household debt service to disposable income levels near multi-decade lows. 

But rising rates could change all this in the very near future.  As a quick example, lets assume the median household makes $56,000 per year and gets to take home 75% of that, or roughly $42,000.  As we mentioned above, the average household has roughly $133,000 of debt outstanding.  Assuming the average rate on that debt is 5% (which seems generous but stick with us) would imply $6,650 worth of interest payments per year, or roughly 16% of take home pay.

Unfortunately, a significant portion of consumer debt carries floating interest rates.  Therefore, in the most dire scenario, a 1% increase in rates will translate into an extra $1,330 of annual interest payments, $110 per month, and a roughly 3.2% reduction in discretionary personal income. 

So while the fed-induced treasury bubble has been fun for debt-thirsty Americans willing to take on any amount of leverage so long as they can afford the monthly payments, we suspect the unwind is going to be equally painful.

The State Of The Debt Union: Red Vs Blue States

Politics can be a divisive topic, where issues and events can polarize the population into opposite sides of the spectrum. With this in mind, Lending Club took a look at the state of debt in the United States during this Presidential election race and break down how personal debt compares between red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states.

So, when we take a look at average personal loan debt and credit card loan debt by state, what do the balance sheets say?

The answer: it’s close!

Below, we’ve compiled a graphic that shows whether red, blue, or battleground states have the most debt along with the top highlights.

Debt Overview Highlights:

Highest average personal loan debt:

Hawaii (Blue state)

It may be out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but residents of this vacation destination state are also big debtors, with an average personal loan debt of $11,327. Looks like surf’s not the only thing that’s up in Hawaii.

Lowest average personal loan debt:

New Mexico (Battleground state)

New Mexico was the setting for the hit TV series Breaking Bad, but it certainly looks like it’s not breaking the bank with a nationally-low $5,480 average of personal loan debt.

Highest average credit card debt:

Alaska (Red state)

Although some things may be frozen in Alaska, it looks like credit cards aren’t one of those things; the average credit card debt in the state is $6,778. Alaska residents, check out Lending Club’s personal loan calculator to see if you can consolidate your debt at a lower rate!

Lowest average credit card debt:

Iowa (Red state)

Taking the lead in more than just being the first state primary, Iowa also has good financial momentum when it comes to its average credit card debt of $4,299. It looks like Iowa knows how to caucus and keep their average credit card debt down.