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Americans Are Falling Behind on Their $1.25T Credit-Card Bill
- anonymouscaller 5mo agoArticle highlights a looming issue in the US, but why open the article with an example of a high income earner living alone who is spending beyond her needs? Makes you wonder if the author has some kind of bias...
- brianwawok 5mo agoWhats the right metric to consider credit card debt bad, or degrees of badness? When looking at nations, we look at debt compared to GDP. So for individuals, it would be debt compared to income? So someone who makes 20k and has a 10k credit card debt, is in the same bucket at someone making 200k with 100k in credit card debt. But, the 100k in debt person is in more trouble than someone who makes 500k and has 200k in debt.
- mechagodzilla 5mo ago"Household Debt Service Payments as a Percent of Disposable Personal Income": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
- LUmBULtERA 5mo agoThat's the right metric, thank you. And this looks like it's relatively low.
- NewJazz 5mo agoThey only started measuring in 2005. I wouldn't consider 10% low tbh.
- brianwawok 5mo agoPerfect. So still almost 50% below 2008 level?
- expedition32 5mo agoAmerica: if you owe the bank 100 trillion dollars it is the bank that has a problem.
- hyperhello 5mo agoI have to assume that the bank had been prepared for the situation somewhere around the first trillion and doesn’t have “a problem”.
- gopher_space 5mo agoOne interesting metric would be the shrinking percentage of your credit report landlords use to make decisions.
- bell-cot 5mo agoPossibly. Though these days, I wouldn't be surprised if the WSJ was A/B testing versions with different opening examples, while showing 99% of their audience the current "max. clickiness" one.
- Terr_ 5mo agoOccam's razor: They wanted an short debt-scenario that reads as somehow unexpected and unusual so that visitors keep reading, versus a true but depressingly-common one. I mean, I just have to say something like "single-parent slipping further behind each month"... and I bet most of y'all are already familiar enough with the concept that you're imagining it without prompting.
- halestock 5mo agoThe WSJ's target audience is high income earners, so it's more about making a story that appeals to them.
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