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Global Debt Surpasses 244 Trillion Dollars As “Nearly Half The World Lives On Less Than $5.50 A Day”

January 18, 2019

Global Debt Surpasses 244 Trillion Dollars As “Nearly Half The World Lives On Less Than $5.50 A Day”

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and one of the primary ways that the elite keep the rest of us subjugated is through the $244,000,000,000,000 mountain of global debt that has been accumulated. Every single day, the benefits of our labor are going to enrich somebody else. A portion of the taxes that are deducted from your paycheck is used to pay interest on government debt. A portion of the profits that your company makes probably goes to servicing some form of business debt. And most Americans are continuously making payments on their mortgages, their auto loans, their credit card balances and their student loan debts. But most people never stop to think about who is becoming exceedingly wealthy on the other end of these transactions. Needless to say, it isn’t the 46 percent of the global population that is living on less than $5.50 a day.

The world has never seen anything like this mountain of debt ever before, and one of the central themes of The Economic Collapse Blog is that all of this debt will ultimately destroy our society. According to the Institute of International Finance, the total amount of global debt is now “more than three times the size of the global economy”…

The world’s debt pile is hovering near a record at $244 trillion, which is more than three times the size of the global economy, according to an analysis by the Institute of International Finance.

The global debt-to-GDP ratio exceeded 318 percent in the third quarter of last year, despite a stronger pace of economic growth, according to a report by the Washington-based IIF released on Tuesday.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Debt Surpasses 244 Trillion Dollars As “Nearly Half The World Lives On Less Than $5.50 A Day”

January 16, 2019

Global Debt Surpasses 244 Trillion Dollars As “Nearly Half The World Lives On Less Than $5.50 A Day”

The world’s debt pile is hovering near a record at $244 trillion, which is more than three times the size of the global economy, according to an analysis by the Institute of International Finance.

The global debt-to-GDP ratio exceeded 318 percent in the third quarter of last year, despite a stronger pace of economic growth, according to a report by the Washington-based IIF released on Tuesday.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q3 2018

November 8, 2018

The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q3 2018

Consumers are being lackadaisical again with their plastic.

Consumer debt – or euphemistically, consumer “credit” – jumped 4.9% in the third quarter compared to the third quarter last year, or by $182 billion, to almost, but no cigar, $4 trillion, or more precisely $3.93 trillion (not seasonally adjusted), according to the Federal Reserve this afternoon. As befits the stalwart American consumers, it was the highest ever.

Consumer debt includes credit-card debt, auto loans, and student loans, but does not include mortgage-related debt:

The nearly $4 trillion in consumer debt is up 49% from the prior peak at the cusp of the Financial Crisis in Q2 2008 (not adjusted for inflation). Over the same period, nominal GDP (not adjusted for inflation) is up 39% — thus continuing the time-honored trend of debt rising faster than nominal GDP.

But a hot economy is helping out: While over the past 12 months, consumer debt jumped by 4.9%, nominal GDP jumped by 5.5%. A similar phenomenon also occurred in Q2. This is rather rare. The last time nominal GDP outgrew consumer credit, and the only time since the Great Recession, was in the three quarters from Q1 through Q3 2015.

Auto loans and leases

Auto loans and leases for new and used vehicles in Q3 jumped by $41 billion from a year ago, or by 3.7%, to a record of $1.11 trillion. These loan balances are impacted mainly by these factors: prices of vehicles, mix of new and used, number of vehicles financed, the average loan-to-value ratio, and duration of loans originated in prior years.

The green line in the chart represents the old data before the adjustment in September 2017. These adjustments to consumer credit occur every five years, based on new Census survey data. Most of the adjustments affected auto-loan balances, reducing them by $38 billion retroactively to 2015.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Subprime Auto Implosion In Full Effect As Lenders Start Dropping Like Flies

April 8, 2018

Subprime Auto Implosion In Full Effect As Lenders Start Dropping Like Flies

We are in the midst of watching the subprime auto lending bubble burst in its entirety. Smaller subprime auto lenders are starting to implode, and we all know what comes next: the larger companies go bust, inciting real capitulation.

In addition to our coverage out just days ago talking about how the subprime bubble has burst and, since then since has been crunched even further, additional reports today are showing that smaller subprime lenders are starting to simply implode after being faced with losses and defaults. In addition to losses and defaults, Bloomberg reported this morning that there have been allegations of fraud and under reporting losses, tactics that are clearly reminiscent of <throw a dart at any financial crisis/bubble burst over the last 30 years>:

Growing numbers of small subprime auto lenders are closing or shutting down after loan losses and slim margins spur banks and private equity owners to cut off funding.

Summit Financial Corp., a Plantation, Florida-based subprime car finance company, filed for bankruptcy late last month after lenders including Bank of America Corp. said it had misreported losses from soured loans. And a creditor to Spring Tree Lending, an Atlanta-based subprime auto lender, filed to force the company into bankruptcy last week, after a separate group of investors accused the company of fraud. Private equity-backed Pelican Auto Finance, which specialized in “deep subprime” borrowers, finished winding down last month after seeing its profit margins shrink.

The article continues:

The pain among smaller lenders has parallels with the subprime mortgage crisis last decade, when the demise of finance companies like Ownit Mortgage and Sebring Capital Partners were a harbinger that bigger losses for the financial system were coming. In both cases, rising interest rates helped trigger more loan losses.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The State of the American Debt Slaves

February 8, 2018

The State of the American Debt Slaves

It was one gigantic party. But wait…

Total consumer credit rose 5.4% in the fourth quarter, year over year, to a record $3.84 trillion not seasonally adjusted, according to the Federal Reserve. This includes credit-card debt, auto loans, and student loans, but not mortgage-related debt. December had been somewhat of a disappointment for those that want consumers to drown in debt, but the prior months, starting in Q4 2016, had seen blistering surges of consumer debt.

Think what you will of the election – consumers celebrated it or bemoaned it the American way: by piling on debt.

The chart below shows the progression of consumer debt since 2006 (not seasonally adjusted). Note the slight dip after the Financial Crisis, as consumers deleveraged – with much of the deleveraging being accomplished by defaulting on those debts. But it didn’t last long. And consumer debt has surged since. It’s now 45% higher than it had been in Q4 2008. Food for thought: Over the period, the consumer price index increased 17.5%:

Credit card debt and other revolving credit in Q4 rose 6% year-over-year to $1.027 trillion, a blistering pace, but it was down from the 9.2% surge in Q3, the nearly 10% surge in Q2, and the dizzying 12% surge in Q1. So the growth of credit card debt in Q4 was somewhat of a disappointment for those wanting to see consumers drown in expensive debt.

The chart below shows the leap of the past four quarters over prior years. This pushed credit card debt in Q3 and Q4 finally over the prior record set in Q4 2008 ($1.004 trillion), before it came tumbling down via said “deleveraging.”

These are not seasonally adjusted numbers, and you can see the seasonal surges in credit card debt every Q4 during shopping season (as marked), and the drop afterwards in Q1.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Auto-Loan Subprime Blows Up Lehman-Moment-Like

November 15, 2017

Auto-Loan Subprime Blows Up Lehman-Moment-Like

But there is no Financial Crisis. These are the boom times.

Given Americans’ ceaseless urge to borrow and spend, household debt in the third quarter surged by $610 billion, or 5%, from the third quarter last year, to a new record of $13 trillion, according to the New York Fed. If the word “surged” appears a lot, it’s because that’s the kind of debt environment we now have:

Mortgage debt surged 4.2% year-over-year, to $9.19 trillion, still shy of the all-time record of $10 trillion in 2008 before it all collapsed.
Student loans surged by 6.25% year-over-year to a record of $1.36 trillion.
Credit card debt surged 8% to $810 billion.
“Other” surged 5.4% to $390 billion.
And auto loans surged 6.1% to a record $1.21 trillion.

And given how the US economy depends on consumer borrowing for life support, that’s all good.

However, there are some big ugly flies in that ointment: Delinquencies – not everywhere, but in credit cards, and particularly in subprime auto loans, where serious delinquencies have reached Lehman Moment proportions.

Of the $1.2 trillion in auto loans outstanding, $282 billion (24%) were granted to borrowers with a subprime credit score (below 620).

Of all auto loans outstanding, 2.4% were 90+ days (“seriously”) delinquent, up from 2.3% in the prior quarter. But delinquencies are concentrated in the subprime segment – that $282 billion – and all hell is breaking lose there.

Subprime auto lending has attracted specialty lenders, such as Santander Consumer USA. They feel they can handle the risks, and they off-loaded some of the risks to investors via subprime auto-loan-backed securities. They want to cash in on the fat profits often obtained in subprime lending via extraordinarily high interest rates.

Subprime borrowers are perceived as sitting ducks. They’ve been turned down, and they’re aware of their bad credit, and they often think they have no other options. And so they often end up with ludicrously high interest rates on their loans, which these borrowers, because of the ludicrously high interest rates, have trouble servicing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How The Elite Dominate The World – Part 1: Debt As A Tool Of Enslavement

October 16, 2017

How The Elite Dominate The World – Part 1: Debt As A Tool Of Enslavement

Throughout human history, those in the ruling class have found various ways to force those under them to work for their economic benefit. But in our day and age, we are willingly enslaving ourselves. The borrower is the servant of the lender, and there has never been more debt in our world than there is right now. According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt has hit the 217 trillion dollar mark, although other estimates would put this number far higher. Of course everyone knows that our planet is drowning in debt, but most people never stop to consider who owns all of this debt. This unprecedented debt bubble represents that greatest transfer of wealth in human history, and those that are being enriched are the extremely wealthy elitists at the very, very top of the food chain.

Did you know that 8 men now have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people living on the planet combined?

Every year, the gap between the planet’s ultra-wealthy and the poor just becomes greater and greater. This is something that I have written about frequently, and the “financialization” of the global economy is playing a major role in this trend.

The entire global financial system is based on debt, and this debt-based system endlessly funnels the wealth of the world to the very, very top of the pyramid.

It has been said that Albert Einstein once made the following statement…

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Recession 2017? Things Are Happening That Usually Never Happen Unless A New Recession Is Beginning

February 9, 2017

Recession 2017? Things Are Happening That Usually Never Happen Unless A New Recession Is Beginning

Is the U.S. economy about to get slammed by a major recession? According to Gallup, U.S. economic confidence has soared to the highest level ever recorded, but meanwhile a whole host of key economic indicators are absolutely screaming that a new recession is beginning. And if the U.S. economy does officially enter recession territory in 2017, it certainly won’t be a shock, because the truth is that we are well overdue for one. Donald Trump has inherited quite an economic mess from Barack Obama, and it was probably inevitable that we were headed for a significant economic downturn no matter who won the election.

One of the key indicators to watch is average weekly hours. When the economy shifts into recession mode, employers tend to start cutting back hours, and that is happening right now. In fact, as Graham Summers has pointed out, we just witnessed the largest percentage decline in average weekly hours since the recession of 2008…

In addition to the decline in hours, Summers has suggested that there are a number of other reasons to believe that a new recession is here…

The fact is that the GDP growth of 4%-5% is not just around the corner. The US most likely slid into recession in the last three months. GDP growth collapsed in 4Q16, with a large portion of the “growth” coming from accounting gimmicks.

Consider the following:

Tax receipts indicate the US is in recession.

Gross private domestic investment indicates were are in a recession.

Retailers are showing that the US consumer is tapped out (see AMZN’s recent miss).

UPS, another economic bellweather, dramatically lowered 2017 forecasts.

To me, even more alarming is the tightening of lending standards. In our debt-based economy, the flow of credit is absolutely critical to economic growth, and when credit starts to get tight that almost always leads to a recession.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This is How Consumers Turn into Debt Slaves

November 12, 2016

This is How Consumers Turn into Debt Slaves

The Fed likes the word “credit.” Sounds less onerous than “debt.”

Consumer debt rose by $19.3 billion in September to $3.71 trillion, another record in a five-year series of records, the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors reported on Monday. Consumer debt is up 6% from a year ago, at a time when wages are barely creeping up and when consumer spending rose only 2.4% over the same period.

This follows the elegant principle of borrowing ever more to produce smaller and smaller gains in spending and economic growth. Which is a highly sustainable economic model with enormous future potential, according to the Fed.

Consumer debt – the Fed uses “consumer credit,” which is the same thing but sounds a lot less onerous – includes student loans, auto loans, and revolving credit, such as credit cards and lines of credit. But it does not include mortgages. And that borrowing binge looks like this:

us-consumer-debt-total-ex-mortgages-2016-09

Diving into the components, so to speak: outstanding balances of new and used vehicle loans and leases jumped by $22.6 billion from Q2 to $1.098 trillion, another record in an uninterrupted four-year series of records.

Auto loans have soared 38% from Q3 2012, the time when they regained the glory levels of the Greenspan bubble before the Financial Crisis:

us-consumer-debt-auto-2016-09

Auto loan balances have soared because people bought more cars. New car sales hit an all-time record last year, though they’ve started to flatten out or decline in recent months. The balances have also been rising because loan terms are getting stretched, and because the balances on individual loans have been getting bigger as cars got more expensive and loan-to-value ratios rose:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Subprime Auto Loan Meltdown Is Here

February 25, 2016

The Subprime Auto Loan Meltdown Is Here

Uh oh – here we go again. Do you remember the subprime mortgage meltdown during the last financial crisis? Well, now a similar thing is happening with auto loans. The auto industry has been doing better than many other areas of the economy in recent years, but this “mini-boom” was fueled in large part by customers with subprime credit. According to Equifax, an astounding 23.5 percent of all new auto loans were made to subprime borrowers in 2015. At this point, there is a total of somewhere around $200 billion in subprime auto loans floating around out there, and many of these loans have been “repackaged” and sold to investors. I know – all of this sounds a little too close for comfort to what happened with subprime mortgages the last time around. We never seem to learn from our mistakes, and a lot of investors are going to end up paying the price.

Everything would be fine if the number of subprime borrowers not making their payments was extremely low. And that was true for a while, but now delinquency rates and default rates are rising to levels that we haven’t seen since the last recession. The following comes from Time Magazine…

People, especially those with shaky credit, are having a tougher time than usual making their car payments.

According to Bloomberg, almost 5% of subprime car loans that were bundled into securities and sold to investors are delinquent, and the default rate is even higher than that. (Depending on who’s counting, delinquency is up to three or four months behind in payments; default is what happens after that). At just over 12% in January, the default rate jumped one entire percentage point in just a month. Both delinquency and default rates are now the highest they’ve been since 2010, when the ripple effects of the recession still weighed heavily on many Americans’ finances.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It Starts: Subprime Auto Loans Implode (in Your Bond Fund)

February 24, 2016

It Starts: Subprime Auto Loans Implode (in Your Bond Fund)

“Fears of an impending liquidity crunch in that asset class.”

“What is happening in this space today reminds me of what happened in mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the crisis,” U.S. Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry warned in October about the auto loan bubble.

And his warning is now becoming reality.

Subprime auto loans aren’t big enough to take down our megabanks, the way subprime mortgages had done. But they’re big enough to take down specialized auto lenders and cause a lot of tears among investors that bought the highly rated structured securities backed by subprime and deep-subprime auto loans that are now defaulting at a rate last seen during the days of the Financial Crisis.

And they’re big enough to knock the auto industry, one of the few booming sectors in the otherwise lackadaisical economy, off its record perch. An auto-loan implosion would start at subprime and work its way up, just like mortgages had done.

The business of “repackaging” these loans, including subprime and deep-subprime loans, into asset backed securities has also been booming. These ABS are structured with different tranches, so that the highest tranches – the last ones to absorb any losses – can be stamped with high credit ratings and offloaded to bond mutual funds designed for retail investors.

Deep-subprime borrowers are high-risk. Typically they have credit scores below 550. To make it worth everyone’s while, they get stuffed into loans often with interest rates above 20%. To make payments even remotely possible at these rates, terms are often stretched to 84 months. Borrowers are typically upside down in their vehicle: the negative equity of their trade-in, along with title, taxes, and license fees, and a hefty dealer profit are rolled into the loan. When the lender repossesses the vehicle, losses add up in a hurry.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Consumer Drowning Sorrows at the Bar

January 16, 2016

CONSUMER DROWNING SORROWS AT THE BAR

Month after month I watch as the MSM mouthpieces try to spin declining consumer spending in a positive light. They are practically out of excuses. They are befuddled, because month after month they report “awesome” job gains and can’t understand why all these gainfully employed Americans aren’t buying shit they don’t need like they used to. These faux journalists, spouting propaganda for their ruling class bosses, are willfully ignorant of the fact the job gains are in low paying part-time jobs and the fact that Obamacare and record high rents are sapping any discretionary income households would use to buy stuff.

Despite the propaganda from the media and happy talk from the Liar-in-Chief, the country is currently in a recession and the Fed has no ammo to fake another recovery. We are going down and going down hard. When 70% of your economy is based on Americans buying shit they don’t need from China on credit cards, a dramatic slowdown in consumer spending equals recession. When sales actually fall from November to December during the holiday season, you are in recession. We’ve arrived.

The December report was a disaster and portends horrible retailer results coming down the road. More ghost malls coming to your neighborhood. The annual results were pitiful, with the more recent months even more dreadful. So after adding 10 million jobs, according to Obama, spending declines? They must be great jobs.

I think the results are even worse than portrayed in the results presented by the Census Bureau. Retail sales grew by only 2.2% in 2015 versus 2014. That is significantly less than the real inflation being experienced by real people, so on an inflation adjusted basis they fell. Even the 2.2% increase is artificially pumped up by the Fed induced auto debt fueled boom in car sales (or long-term rentals in reality).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Bank Failures and Systemic Breakdowns”: Regulator Warns on Autos, Subprime, Commercial Real-Estate…

October 22, 2015

“Bank Failures and Systemic Breakdowns”: Regulator Warns on Autos, Subprime, Commercial Real-Estate…

If you look at auto sales, which are flirting with all-time highs, and at commercial real-estate prices, which are way beyond all-time highs, and if you look at the loans, including subprime, that make it all happen, you’d think the US economy is in a white-hot economic boom.

But the economy is barely limping along. What’s booming is cheap but iffy debt that for the moment still looks good on the surface. And that is rattling bank regulators.

“We are clearly reaching the point in the cycle where credit risk is moving to the forefront,” explained Thomas Curry, Comptroller of the Currency, in a speech today. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) – one in the triad of federal bank regulators alongside the Fed and the FDIC – is fretting about banks’ exposure to the increasing risks of ballooning auto loans, particularly subprime auto loans, and commercial real-estate loans.

As they did in the run-up to the Financial Crisis, banks are “repackaging” these loans, including subprime loans, into highly-rated asset-backed securities, in face of “strong demand by investors” that are reaching for yield, in an environment where banks “are reaching for loan growth.” After having “already extended credit to their best customers,” they’re now lending to “less creditworthy borrowers, with all of the increased risk that entails.”

But the auto-loan binge is good for everyone. It’s good “for automakers and the economy,” he said. “It’s also good for banks,” whose financing made “this activity possible.” By the end of Q2, auto loans accounted for 10% of all retail credit in OCC-regulated banks, up from 7% in Q2 2011.

Total auto-loan balances outstanding shot up 10.5% in 12 months at the end of the second quarter and hit $1 trillion, according to Equifax. And 23.5% of new loans earlier this year were subprime, up from 22.7% a year ago.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Is Another “Subprime” Waiting to Blow

September 11, 2015

This Is Another “Subprime” Waiting to Blow

Dow down 239 points yesterday – or 1.5% – after Japan posted its biggest one-day gain in seven years. This is getting interesting again. If it is just “volatility,” as Wall Street’s shills in the press maintain, it will probably pass soon. Everything will be okay. Back to routine imbecility before the end of the month.

But if these whipsaw movements are heralding a bear market, U.S. stock prices could be cut in half… or more. And they may not recover for 10 to 20 years. (Catch up on the details of our bear market forecast here.)

Bull or Bear?

Which is it? Bull or Bear? No one knows, of course. But it looks to us as though the whole shebang is getting ready to collapse. So far, the correction has trimmed $12.5 trillion off the value of global stock markets. There are a few reasons for stocks to go back up… and many reasons why they might want to go down further.

The 2008 global financial crisis was centered on mortgage debt. There was too much of it that couldn’t be repaid. When the value of the collateral – homes – headed down, the bubble popped.

Today, consumers have about the same amount of debt. But now the excesses are in auto loans and student debt. As you can see below, total auto loans stood at about $781 billion in 2007. Today, they’ve topped $1 trillion. And student loans have more than doubled over that time to $1.3 trillion.

Again, the collateral is falling in value. Used-car prices fall, as leases expire and more used cars hit the market. As for student debt, the “collateral” is the earning power of the person who borrowed the money.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Liars Loans” are Back…but with a Twist

September 9, 2015

“Liars Loans” are Back…but with a Twist

Screen Shot 2015-09-08 at 1.18.59 PM

Most of you will be intimately familiar with the roll “liars loans” played in last decade’s financial crisis. In a nutshell, these were loans in which the borrower was encouraged to lie about his or her income in order to qualify for a mortgage they couldn’t actually handle. In the aftermath of the crisis, regulations have been put in place to ensure lenders verify income and the ability of the borrower to service the mortgage. As is always the case, there’s a loophole, and Wall Street is already exploiting it.

The loophole pertains to loans for homes that will be used for business purposes. Unsurprisingly, people are lying about the true use of their homes to avoid regulations. Some of these are then being packaged in AAA rated bond issuances.

From Bloomberg:

The pitch arrived with an iconic image of the American Dream: a neat house with a white picket fence.

But behind that picture of a $2.95 million home in Manhattan Beach, California, were hints of something darker: liar loans, those toxic mortgages of the subprime era.

Years after the great American housing bust, mortgages akin to the so-called liar loans — which were made without verifying people’s finances — are creeping back into the market. And, like last time, they’re spreading risks far and wide via Wall Street.

Today’s versions bear only passing resemblance to the ones that proliferated in the mid-2000s, and they’re by no means as widespread. Still, they reflect how the business is starting to join in the frenzy that’s been creating booms in everything from subprime car loans to junk-rated company bonds.

Just in case you aren’t up to speed on the subprime auto bubble:

Subprime Auto Loan “Titan” Foolishly Proclaims There’s Nothing to Worry About

Gotta Keep Dancing – Honda Executive Laments “Stupid” Auto Loans Driving U.S. Sales Higher

Chinese Homebuilders Expand in America as U.S. Auto Loans Hit Record Levels

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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