See, there you go again. Debt has gone up. Can you grant me that obvious fact?
Not if you can't provide any supporting evidence. And even if the nominal amount of outstanding household debt HAS risen over the last year (which it surely has), how is that meaningful? By itself, it's not. Rising debt is not automatically bad - in a growing economy, one should expect to see nominal debt levels rising. But that, by itself, says nothing about "debt burdens" (your term, not mine) or even household wealth. Now, if debt is rising faster than one's assets, then net worth is falling, but that's not happening as far as I know. And if debt service is rising faster than incomes, then that is also "lost ground", but I've shown that this has not happened - at least since Bush took office.
As for "average" vs. "median", "average American" was your term, not mine. But the fed calculates those debt burden ratios from the Survey of Consumer Finances and Commerce Department household income data, so if you want to go to the source reports and see which they are using - mean or median - and whether it makes any difference, be my guest.
The Fed's ratio, however, has been the standard for gauging household debt burdens for many years now. Should we toss it out along with GDP and the BLS's unemployment reports because they don't support the "damn the data - this economy sucks anyway" arguments of you, kenny and Dizzie? |
