"Consumer debt has been steadily falling over the last couple of years. The Federal Reserve said last week that household liabilities — including mortgages, credit card accounts and non-revolving accounts like auto loans — totaled $13.9 trillion in the second quarter of 2010, down $200 billion from the same quarter a year earlier. Outstanding revolving accounts, mostly credit cards, declined to $832.2 billion from $915 billion in that same period, the Fed said in a separate report earlier in the month."
Americans are tightening their belts and leading more virtuous lives. The saving rate is way up! Credit card debt is way down!
What responsible people we are, with our flinty yankee virtues. If only that wicked government could be as virtuous as the people!
:patriot: :patriot: :patriot:
Needless to say, that is bullshit.
"But economists said they were trying to calculate how much of the drop in credit card debt was the result of banks writing it off — charging off, in bank parlance.
Mr. deRitis, of Moody’s, said he was examining the credit card accounts of individual borrowers. He said he expected to learn which borrowers were voluntarily paying down their debt, which were taking on new debt, and to what extent existing borrowers were curtailing balances by paying more than the minimum. While the study is not yet complete, Mr. deRitis said it appeared
so far that most of the overall decline is in the form of charge-offs."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/business/25credit.html?hpwOhhh... the huge drop in credit card debt is mostly due to credit card banks switching hopeless defaulted-on accounts from outstanding debt to written-off losses. (Mostly for tax purposes, I'd think.)
Now then... back to, "Why can't the government be more like the people?" The government really doesn't have the option of declaring 10% of the national debt noncollectable just to get it off the books.