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Discussion Paper
What Happened to the Revolving Credit Card Balances of 2009?
We track the disposition of revolving credit card balances that existed as of March 2009 ? the peak of outstanding balances in our data set ? over a four-year period. We find that 75 percent of those balances had been paid off or charged off by February 2013. Charge-offs played a much smaller role in balance reduction than did paydown: 27.8 percent of balances were charged off, while 72.2 percent were paid down. Charge-offs accounted for a much larger share of balance reduction in the riskiest quintile and almost none of the reduction in the least risky quintile. After stratifying by risk ...
Discussion Paper
Just Released: Household Debt Balances Increase as Deleveraging Period Concludes
The New York Fed released the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the third quarter of 2014 today. Balances continued to rise slightly, with an overall increase of $78 billion. The aggregate household debt balance now stands at $11.71 trillion, up 0.7 percent from the previous quarter, but still well below the peak of $12.68 trillion in the third quarter of 2008.
Discussion Paper
Have Consumers Been Deleveraging?
Since its peak in summer 2008, U.S. consumers? indebtedness has fallen by more than a trillion dollars. Over roughly the same period, charge-offs?the removal of obligations from consumers? credit reports because of defaults?have risen sharply, especially on loans secured by houses, which make up about 80 percent of consumer liabilities. An important question for gauging the behavior of U.S. consumers is how to interpret these two trends. Is the reduction in debts entirely attributable to defaults, or are consumers actively reducing their debts? In this post, we demonstrate that a significant ...
Discussion Paper
Have Consumers Been Deleveraging?
Since its peak in summer 2008, U.S. consumers’ indebtedness has fallen by more than a trillion dollars. Over roughly the same period, charge-offs—the removal of obligations from consumers’ credit reports because of defaults—have risen sharply, especially on loans secured by houses, which make up about 80 percent of consumer liabilities. An important question for gauging the behavior of U.S. consumers is how to interpret these two trends. Is the reduction in debts entirely attributable to defaults, or are consumers actively reducing their debts? In this post, we demonstrate that a ...
Working Paper
Consumer debt dynamics:follow the increasers
Consumer debt played a central role in creating the U.S. housing bubble, the ensuing housing downturn, and the Great Recession, and it has been blamed as a factor in the weak subsequent recovery as well. This paper uses micro-level data to decompose consumer debt dynamics by separating the actions of consumer debt increasers and decreasers, and then further decomposing movements into percentage and size margins among the increasers and decreasers. We view such a decomposition as informative for macroeconomic models featuring a central role for consumer debt. Using this framework, we show that ...