Are Subprime Debt Slaves, a Leading Indicator, Worrying the Fed?
The new Fed remains a somewhat unknown quantity: There are still four vacancies on the Fed’s seven-member Board of Governors that forms the core of the policy-making FOMC. The new Chairman, Jerome Powell, has already shown in his testimony before Congress last week that he may use a little more straight talk than his predecessors, and the markets took notice.
No one knows for sure what this new Fed will look like once the four vacancies are filled. But this new Fed will likely try to push interest rates back to a somewhat more normal level and lighten their balance sheet so that they have some options when the business cycle trips over balled-up credit problems.
With consumers, the credit problems appear first among the most fragile, most at risk, and most strung-out – borrowers with subprime credit ratings, and with lenders that went after these consumers aggressively. And this is happening now.
Small banks pushed with all their might into credit cards, loosening credit standards, lowering credit score requirements, raising credit limits, and offering new cards to people who had already maxed out their existing cards and had limited or no ability to service them from their income, and no way of paying them off – and thus are stuck with usurious interest rates that make these credit card balances impossible to service.
For small banks it was the Holy Grail: to profit from the American debt slave.
There are about 4,888 commercial banks in the US. There are the top 100 banks, and there are the 4,788 smaller banks – those with less than $14 billion in assets. These smaller banks have seen this irresistibly sweet deal. Banks were paying next to nothing in interest to their depositors, but they could charge 25% or 30% interest on outstanding credit card balances.
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