Free Republic

Under Bidenomics, with its high inflation rate and crushing negative wage growth, consumers are draining their savings and living on a prayer …. and consumer credit to cope. US consumer credit just rose to $17.3 trillion, up dramatically since Biden’s inaugaration as El Presidente of the United Banana Republics of America. ffffff A closer look at credit card delinquency rates on a year-over-year (YoY) basis, showing the fastest growth in delinquencies since the Covid economic lockdowns. Then we have commercial real estate delinquencies are now the highest the have been since 2013. Meanwhile, University of Michigan consumer sentiment about inflation...

Moody’s on Friday changed its outlook on the US credit rating to “negative” from “stable” citing large fiscal deficits and a decline in debt affordability. The move follows a rating downgrade of the sovereign by another rating agency, Fitch, earlier this year, which came after months of political brinkmanship around the US debt ceiling.

With auto loan rates at historic highs, rising payments, and mounting consumer debt, the auto lending industry is facing an inflection point. With lenders continuing to tighten restrictions and some even deciding to leave the consumer auto loans market, the stage is set for what could become a full-blown auto loan debt crisis. But how impactful such a crisis would be and how the industry can navigate its way out remains to be seen.

We are Livin’ la vida Biden as Biden continues to push illegal immigration and working with Communist dictators like Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and NOT expand US energy production. The Biden administration released a statement Thursday warning financial institutions against using a person’s immigration status in credit applications. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a joint statement telling financial institutions that while it is not illegal to consider a person’s immigration status in the decision on whether to lend money, an overreliance on it could run afoul of the law, according to the statement....

Is Biden trying to burn down the economic house? Under Bidenomics, America’s middle class and low wage workers are suffering from a wild, wild life in terms of inflation. First, food prices are up 20% since December 2020. Talk about destruction of middle class wealth! That is in addition to gasoline prices are up 64% under Biden while rent growth is up 252%. Well, Biden waived through millions of illegal immigrants and rent had to rise. Biden and Washington DC’s broken borders is Livin’ La Vida Loco. To cope with inflation (that Paul Krugman claims is over but the last...

Bidenomics is failing catestropically. Example? As interest rates rise to fight Biden’s Federal spending splurges, bank credit growth slowed to -0.41% YoY for the 10th straight week of negative credit growth. While interest paid on short-term loans almost 10%!! “Jimmy, watch me tank the economy even worse than you did!”

Coping with inflation caused by Federal spending (and excessive Fed stimulus) is difficult and eventually consumer max out their credit cards. Like now! Credit card useage nosedived by -10.8% in September, according to Citi. This is the fifth straight month of spending decleration. Leading the decline was electronics. The leader on the positive sign was … jewelry?? Hey, I thought mobs of people were robbing stores because they were hungry!! In terms of bank credit, rising rates to fight inflation, bank credit growth Bank credit growth has been negative for nine straigth weeks. Then we have unrealized losses on bank...

Goldman Sachs predicts credit card losses will continue to climb through the end of 2024/early 2025. What is unusual is that the losses are accelerating outside of an economic downturn, the firm said. Credit card losses currently stand at 3.63%, up 1.5 percentage points from the bottom. Credit card companies are racking up losses at the fastest pace in almost 30 years, outside of the Great Financial Crisis, according to Goldman Sachs. Credit card losses bottomed in September 2021, and while initial increases were likely reversals from stimulus, they have been rapidly rising since the first quarter of 2022. Since...

Mike Judge wrote and directed a masterpiece of cinema called “Idiocracy” where large corporations convince a progressive government to use Brawndo (a Gatorade clone) to grow vegetables resulting in a Dust Bowl. Why? Because the Progressive leadership determine that plants crave … electrolytes. But the electrolytes in Bidenomics has resulted in bank credit growth of -0.5% YoY. On the data front, it has become a running joke: the “strong” Bidenomics economy comes with an expiration date, as it is only “strong” for about a month, at which point the initial “strength” is downgraded, and the data is revised sharply lower....

Former President Trump is defending his record on COVID-19, saying he never got the “credit that I deserved” on how he managed the pandemic as president. “I got a lot of good marks on economy. I got a lot of good marks on a lot of things. Rebuilding the military, getting rid of ISIS, the biggest tax cuts in history,” Trump said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” airing Thursday. “I never got, I think, the credit that I deserved on COVID.” With much of his political base skeptical of coronavirus vaccines, Trump, the front-runner for the...

I ain’t never been to Spain, but the US under Biden is like Spain in terms of default risk. Actually, I have to Spain numerous times and love visiting Barcelona. But the US debt fiasco under Biden and Congressional spending sprees has led to … US credit default swap being priced worse than Spain’s CDS. With Biden/Congress orgy of spending (and a declining economy in many important respects), the US is seeing Federal debt near $33 TRILLION and even worse, unfunded Federal liabilities (promises, promises) are at $193 TRILLION, almost 6 times the current Federal debt load. If you are...

Bidenomics is terrible! Just a huge payoff to be big donors (the donor class) for green energy, Big Pharma and Big Defense. Now Biden is considering using ankle monitors to prevent illegal immigrants from leaving Texas and traveling to welfare-friendly blue states like California and New York rather than just enforcing the border. The middle class is truly wasting away with Bidenomics. Then we have consumer credit plunging with massive downward revisions. The Fed reports dramatically weakening consumer credit with negative revisions too. Consumer Credit data from the Fed, the last two months labeled are May and July, chart by...

Thanks to Bidenomics, code for massive Federal spending on green energy initiatives and payoffs fo large donors, we have agonizing inflation and consumers are borrowing more and more to cope with inflation. And with the increased use of debt comes …. drumroll … delinquenices! Let’s start with mortgage loans, the overall delinquency rate is 63bps, near record lows, likely due to the huge home appreciation of the last few years which padded the equity cushion for most homeowners. Even the youngest cohort (18-29 years old) has a delinquency rate only 30bps higher than the aggregate. Unlike the 2007-2011 period, the...

The U.S. and other countries could see their credit ratings tumble in the wake of climate change’s impacts, making their debts harder to pay off. That’s according to research by Patrycja Klusak, a researcher at Cambridge, and a team of scientists who used AI to calculate the likely impact of climate change on the finances of 109 countries around the world. By 2100, under a “business as usual” scenario where greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the rate they have in recent years, the U.S. credit rating could fall 4.6 notches. Klusak’s model has already been adopted by several...

President Yoweri Museveni has criticised the World Bank’s decision to suspend new funding to Uganda in response to a harsh anti-LGBTQ law and has promised to find alternative sources of credit.

Moody’s has cut the credit ratings of ten small and mid-sized banks. The agency cited higher funding costs, rising interest rates, and increased risked due to the failing commercial real estate sector. M&T Bank, BOK Financial, Webster Financial, Pinnacle Financial, Old National Bancorp, and Fulton Financial were among the banks that received downgraded ratings. But it does not stop there. Moody’s is also reviewing six giant banks, including Trist Financial, Bank of New York, Cullen/Frost Bankers, State Street, Northern Trust, and US Bancorp, as they may also be downgraded. Eleven other banks such as Capital One, Citizens Financial, and Fifth...

One of the themesongs of Biden’s Bidenomics should be Credit Card (CC) Rider, since consumers are turning to credit cards to cope with high inflation (Bidenomics). US credit card debt oustanding just passed the $1 trillion mark as consumers continue to struggle with effects of inflation. Caused by The Federal Reserve and insame Federal spending. Note that sticky core inflation is still at 5.63%. If we look at credit card debt compare to The Fed’s balance sheet, we see the relationship. Credit cards + auto loan balances are now over $1.6 trillion. Biden is currently out west trying to sell...

Americans are increasingly turning to their credit cards to cover everyday expenses, with debt surpassing $1 trillion for the first time at the end of June, according to a New York Federal Reserve report published Tuesday. In the three-month period from April to June, total credit card debt surged to $1.03 trillion, an increase of $45 billion, or 4.6% from the previous quarter. It marks the highest level on record in Fed data dating back to 2003. The rise in credit card usage and debt is particularly concerning because interest rates are astronomically high right now. The average credit card...

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who has railed against the nation’s record-high debt, on Thursday called Fitch Ratings’ downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+ a “historic failure of leadership by both political parties and the executive branch.” Manchin, who is flirting with a presidential run as a third-party candidate backed by the group No Labels, has regularly criticized what he views as the lack of bipartisan cooperation in Washington. He blamed the nation’s latest credit downgrade on the inability of Republicans and Democrats in Congress and President Biden to make significant progress in addressing the nation’s $32...

Fitch downgraded its credit rating for the U.S. government, from AAA to AA+, two months after the debt-ceiling crisis was resolved. “In Fitch’s view, there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters," the rating agency said Tuesday. Fitch said the U.S. appeared to suffer from an “erosion of governance," pointing to the Washington brinkmanship over the debt ceiling as an example. With a rating of AA+, the U.S. still holds among the highest possible ratings, which Fitch saying the nation still benefits from a “large, advanced, well-diversified...