“I know what the normal activity looks like, and you have a good point. Still... this is a market like none other I’ve seen. How do you play it?”
Ludwig von Mises wrote, “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
Credit is a strange thing. A lot of folks try to read it, but a good read is very illusive.
Here’s a report from March of last year. It’s almost funny to read, and I’m sure they had good reasons for predicting what they did. Still:
It seems household debt did grow against last year. The problem is delinquency. Here are some rates I ran into from a November 2017 article.
(While new delinquencies are climbing, the overall rate of unpaid card debt remains at a relatively low level for the long term, the report showed. The overall 90-day-plus delinquency rate of credit card debt was 7.47 percent of balances. That compares with 7.08 percent in the third quarter of 2016 and 8.21 percent in 2015. The peak delinquency rate for the third quarter was 13.16 percent, reached in 2010.)
Found that here:
Folks are servicing their debt.
I’m in the middle of sharply reducing my own debt this year.
With the economy blazing along, folks seem to be doing okay compared to other periods.