AvlGuy

U.S. Household Debt: A Frightening Picture

Markham is sniffing up the right tree, as is David Martin. I would suggets that debt as a % of HHI be parsed via HHI quartiles at the very least, perhaps in even more detail.

And with credit card debt, we need to stop using 'average' credit card balances for all HH. Instead, we need to break the data 'snapshot' into 2 groups, those that carried a balance during the time period in question, and those that did not.
We need to assess the size of each group (i heard up to 40% of our 166 million HH dont carry a balance). Then we need to focus on the group that carries a balance and see what that the 'median' balance is. It would be great to also see what the median i-rates were. I suspect that the median credit card balance for the perhaps 100 million HHs that carry a balance is so much higher than the average balance for all HH, that it's strangling them and rendering them irrelevant to a recovery.
Any economic recovery based on consumer spending may have to be built on the balance-free HH, and their numbers may simply not be enuff to do more than keep the recession in a steady-state of existance.