Demanding More Debt
Consumer debt, corporate debt, and government debt are all going up. But that’s not all. Margin debt – debt that investors borrow against their portfolio to buy more stocks – has hit a record of $642.8 billion. What in the world are people thinking?
A blow-off in margin debt mirroring the blow-off in stock prices. Since February of 2016 alone it has soared by ~$170 billion – this is an entirely new level insanity. The current total of 643 billion is more than double the level of margin debt at the tech mania peak and 15.4 times the amount of margin debt just before the crash of 1987. [PT]
Clearly, they’re not thinking. Because thinking takes work. Most people don’t like to work. They like to pretend to work.
Similarly, people may say they care about debt. But, based on their actions, they really don’t. When it comes to the national debt, the overarching philosophy is that it doesn’t matter. Government debt certainly doesn’t matter to Congress. Nor does it matter to the President. In fact, their actions demonstrate they want more of it.
Big corporations with big government contracts want more government debt too. Their businesses demand it. They’ve staked their success on the expectation that the debt slop will continue flowing down the trough where they consume it like rapacious pigs.
The higher education bubble is also based on a faulty foundation of debt. The business model generally requires signing credulous 18 year-olds up for massive amounts of government backed student loans. From what we gather, federal student loan debt is closing in on $1.4 trillion.
Total student loans outstanding (red line – the data are only available from 2007 onward) and total federal government-owned student loans (black line). The former figure was closing in on $1.5 trillion as of Q4 2017. [PT]
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