In this world of 'Fake News' I am always skeptical when I read sensational, 'doom and gloom' Apocalypse articles. However, in the following story, the premises are all easily obtained figures published mostly by the American government. Michael Snyder, in my opinion, simply states the obvious. We are not immune up here north of the border. Canada also carries significant debt with citizens in the hole for more than ever in history. Read this and I'm sure you will be as shocked as I was:
In the entire history of the United States, consumers have never been
in so much debt. And that would not be a crisis as long as the vast
majority of us were regularly making our debt payments, but as you will
see below delinquency levels are starting to rise to extremely alarming
levels. In fact, some of the numbers that are coming in are even worse
than we witnessed at any point during the last recession. If things are
this bad already, what are they going to look like once the economy
really gets bad? Because even though it appears that we are
heading into a new recession,
according to the Federal Reserve it has not officially begun yet. That
means that much worse is yet to come. Just like last time, millions of
Americans will likely lose their jobs, and without an income most of
those that suddenly find themselves unemployed will not be able to pay
their bills. The stage is set for the largest tsunami of consumer debt
defaults that this country has ever seen, and that will absolutely
devastate major financial institutions all across America.
If you think that I am exaggerating even a little bit, please read
over the following list very carefully. The following are 12 statistics
that prove that the U.S. is facing a consumer debt apocalypse…
#1 Total consumer debt in the United States just surpassed
the 4 trillion dollar mark. That has never happened before in all of U.S. history.
#2 When you throw in mortgages and all other kinds of individual debt, U.S. consumers are now
13.5 trillion dollars in debt.
#3 A whopping
480 million credit cards are in circulation in this country. That number has shot up by
nearly 13 percent since 2015.
#4 U.S. consumers are carrying
870 billion dollars worth of balances on their credit cards right now.
#5 56 percent of Americans that currently have credit card balances have been carrying them for more than a year.
#6 The number of “seriously delinquent”credit card accounts in the U.S. has shot up to
37 million.
#7 Americans now owe a total of
1.3 trillion dollars on their auto loans.
#8 At this moment,
more than 7 million Americans
are delinquent on their auto loan payments. The figure has already
surpassed what we witnessed during the peak of the last recession by
about a million.
#9 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States has reached
the 1.5 trillion dollar mark. Over the last 10 years, that number
has more than doubled.
#10 Right now, more than 166 billion dollars in student loan debt is considered to be
“seriously delinquent”.
#11 Millennials are now
more than a trillion dollars in debt. No generation of Americans has ever been deeper in debt at this stage in life.
#12 One recent survey found that
78 percent
of Americans “are living paycheck to paycheck”. Suffocating debt
levels are a big reason why that figure is so incredibly high.
Since so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, that means
that there is very little room for error. During the last recession,
large numbers of Americans immediately began getting behind on their
bills once they were laid off, and we saw mortgage defaults rise to
unprecedented levels. Sadly, we haven’t learned from our past mistakes,
and millions upon millions of Americans will find themselves drowning
in an ocean of red ink once again during this next recession.
But even if you are not living paycheck to paycheck, carrying credit card balances is a very unwise thing to do.
Most Americans don’t realize that if you only make the minimum
payment on a credit card every month, you can end up paying more in
interest than you did for the original purchases. The following comes
from
USA Today…
If a credit-card borrower only made the minimum payments
on $5,000 of debt, for example, they’d be in debt for more than 18 years
and would end up paying $6,372 in interest based on national average
interest rates, according to Ted Rossman, industry analyst for
CreditCards.com.
If you keep playing this game, I promise you that you will never get
rich. Instead, the only people that will be getting wealthy will be the
people that are receiving your debt payments.
Credit card debt
is one of my pet peeves. One of the best financial moves that anyone can make is to get out of credit card debt and never look back.
And that is particularly important at this juncture because the
economy is really starting to slow down. Compared to last year, U.S.
job cut announcements
were up 117 percent in February.
We haven’t seen anything like that since the last financial crisis.
At this point, even mainstream economists are openly admitting what
is coming. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics,
sounded downright gloomy in his most recent article…
The economy is throttling back. Way back.
That’s the message in the near stall out of job growth last month. Job
creation probably isn’t as bad as February’s disappointing numbers
suggest — unusually poor weather played a role in limiting job growth to
just 20,000 — but it is weaker than just a few months ago. Businesses
are nervous, and sentiment is at risk of breaking if anything goes
wrong.
And plenty could go wrong. A recession could materialize swiftly if businesses lose faith, and there is a good chance they will.
And when the next recession strikes, things are going to get very, very rough for U.S. consumers.
A consumer debt apocalypse is coming, and it is going to be incredibly painful.
About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News.
From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent
websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free
to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we
need to wake more people up while there is still time.
I don't think there is anything we can do about this, but everyone should be aware of what is coming and make plans to weather the storm.
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