On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 17:37:42 -0500, jim
wrote:

Ed Huntress wrote:

On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:30:47 -0500, jim ?
wrote:

?Ed Huntress wrote:
??
?? On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 15:04:22 -0500, jim ?"sjedgingN0Sp"@m@mwt,net?
?? wrote:
??
?? Jim, your snipping and clipping has led you to such a dishonest
?? discussion that I'm going to leave you to your regular arguers. It
?? isn't possible to have an honest discussion with you.
?
?I snip your childish name-calling. That seems to be all
?you can muster in the way of an argument.

Oh, by the way, regarding your frequent claim that consumer credit is
in the tank and cannot grow,

I never claimed that a single time, much less frequently.
Consumer credit is less than 5% of total credit market debt.
Total private sector debt is still headed downward.

"...credit card and revolving debt is way down
today they continue to decline as people
pay off old debt and refuse to create new debt
what was going to debt service then
is now going into savings "

"You haven't explained how that is going to happen
prior to 2008 employment and earnings was driven by spending
And the money for spending was coming from
the money made available by private borrowing
that has come to an end "

"That level of borrowing isn't coming back anytime soon"

http://groups.google.com/group/misc....47144af8?hl=en

That was a discussion you had with John Carroll last June, about
consumer borrowing and consumption.

"Before the financial meltdown the US private sector was
spending $4 trillion more than they were bringing in and
that is the cause of the current mess.

"Today the private sector is paying back its debt and saving which
means the private sector is grossly under-spending its income. "

"We don't have a problem with too much production
the problem is that people are now buying less of the goods and
services that businesses produce for a reason.
The reason they are buying less is because they are borrowing less
and paying down old debts and saving against an insecure future."

That was a discussion you had with RD and emoneyjoe, last September.

If you didn't intend to say "[t]hat level of borrowing isn't coming
back anytime soon," then you could just say, "that was then, and this
is now." But it is soon. And it's baaaaaack. Which you once told me
wasn't going to happen, when I said it probably would. d8-)


it's been growing since last August and
is almost back up to its all-time peak:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=TOTALSL

It looks like most of the growth in consumer credit
is due to federal loans to students. It looks like there
has been about $320 billion in growth in federal student
loans in the last 3 years.

'Coud be. I'm through chasing numbers for the weekend.

--
Ed Huntress