Families’ savings not where they should be: That’s one part of the problem. But Mills sees something else in the recovery that’s more disturbing. The number of households tapping alternative financial services are on the rise, meaning that Americans are turning to non-bank lenders for credit: payday loans, refund-anticipation loans, pawnshops, and rent-to-own services.
According to the Urban Institute report, the number of households that used alternative credit products increased 7 percent between 2011 and 2013. And the kind of household seeking alternative financing is changing, too.
– From the Citylab article: Half of All American Families Are Staring at Financial Catastrophe
It’s an economic recovery so lopsided, corrupt and fraudulent only an oligarch could love it.
One of the key themes at Liberty Blitzkrieg since inception has been to point out that the current economic recovery is largely a sham. While there are certainly meaningful innovations happening in the less regulated and corrupt parts of the economy, such as the technology sector, much of the landscape is riddled with waste, fraud, cronyism and stagnation. So much so, that I have gone ahead and characterized the entire post crisis economic environment to be the “oligarch recovery.”
Nowhere is this more evident than within the many statistics demonstrating that things for the growing American underclass are getting worse, not better. An article published last week by Citylabmakes the point. It notes:
