Archive for the ‘Spending’ tag
Credit Card Crisis Watch
The consumer credit card crisis is underway.
Consumer debt has far outpaced real growth in wages:
Source: Innovest
And we’re beginning to see the ramifications of this. From this morning’s NYTimes:
After years of flooding Americans with credit card offers and sky-high credit lines, lenders are sharply curtailing both, just as an eroding economy squeezes consumers.
Currently, the total losses amount to [...]
The Boomer Bust
We’ve been talking about consumer spending quite frequently. And with good reason - it’s a crucial part of the cycle we’re currently in. Or, as Paul Krugman stated, we face a widening gyre with “feedback loops causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control.”
The WSJ takes a demographic look at the crisis, [...]
Spending What You Make
Spending only what you make shouldn’t be a foreign concept. It’ll become a whole lot more familiar in our current economic climate.
Henry Blodget at Clusterstock explains why consumers are a critical component of this recession. [via Feelix]
Because the US consumer is finally broke. For thirty years, we piled on debt and then spent almost every new [...]
Consumer Spending & The Dow
The wild swings in the stock market continued today, with the Dow Jones posting its second largest drop in its history. That’s quite a fall.
And this comes on the coattails on Monday’s news - which saw record gains.
Today’s drop was precipitated by a number of factors - bearish remarks by Ben Bernanke, continued fear about [...]
Stock Fall Watch, Continued
The markets just keep getting scarier.
We’re now at 1999 levels in the stock market, and some are now calling this decade completely lost:
It took eight-and-a-half years for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to march from its first 10000 breakthrough to its peak around 14000, and less than a year to fall below 10000 again. Now, [...]
NYTimes & Spending
The Your Money column in the NYTimes offers an excellent look at personal finance. In the most recent article, Ron suggests a new editorial focus in the coming weeks in keeping with the economic times. And it’s a focus I couldn’t agree with more. Ron asks:
Why not, then, turn our attention to the things we [...]
