Could the house of credit cards Americans have built be on the verge of collapse?
Earlier this week, the New York Fed released the latest data on US household debt, revealing it has grown to a record $13 trillion. Americans have been spending, but they’ve been putting a lot of it on plastic. Credit card balances grew by $24 billion in the last quarter of 2017 alone. Meanwhile, US consumers owe $1.22 trillion on vehicle loans. This can only go on for so long. And there are indications that the American credit card spending spree may be winding down.
Retail sales unexpectedly fell in January, recording their biggest drop in nearly a year.
Passage of a GOP budget that added $300 billion in new spending has focused plenty of attention on surging federal government debt over the last week or so. But Uncle Sam isn’t the only one running up those credit cards. Everyday Americans are also piling on the debt.
Total household debt soared to a record $13 trillion dollars in 2017, according to the latest data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data.
During a podcast last week, Peter Schiff asked a key question: Who is going to buy all of this US debt?
The US Treasury Department plans to auction off around $1.4 trillion in Treasuries this year. And it won’t end there. The department expects that pace of borrowing to continue over the next several years.
That’s a lot of bonds. Who will buy them? Because the biggest purchasers of US debt aren’t in a buying mood.
The Babylon Bee captured the current state of the Republican Party in all of its hypocritical glory. The satirical website proclaimed “Republicans announce plan to pretend to be fiscally conservative again the moment a Democrat takes office.”
The GOP said it would begin to decry deficit spending and the $20 trillion debt in order to win votes as soon as political power swung back to the opposing party.
“‘The second a Democrat is back in the White House, we will once again start yelling about fiscal responsibility,’ Speaker Paul Ryan said in an address to the House of Representatives Friday. ‘For now, we will continue to vote for unsustainable and irresponsible budgets that your children’s children’s children will pay for for centuries to come.’”
Gold supply plateaued last year. Global mine output rose just a paltry 5.7 tons in 2017, according to data compiled by the World Gold Council. That represented the smallest increase since 2008.
The bears were running on Wall Street again Thursday, as the Dow Jones suffered another steep tumble. After a record drop of 1,175 points Tuesday and a rebound Wednesday, the Dow shed another 1,333 points.
The Dow Jones dropped 6.5% in four days. That’s the steepest decline in any week since October 2008. The S&P 500 has shed 6.6% of its value this week, its second-worst drop since 2008. The NASDAQ has also tanked, giving up all of its 2018 gains.
As Peter Schiff put it in his most recent podcast, “This market is looking ugly.”
In 2017, nearly 200 tons of gold flowed into gold-backed ETFs. That positive trend continued in January, according to a report released today by the World Gold Council.
Gold-backed ETFs added 27.6 tons last month, growing assets by 5%. Global gold-backed ETFs collectively held 2,396 tons of the yellow metal at the end of January with a value of about $103.6 billion.
Remember the golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.”
And the Russians have the gold. Or at least they are in the process of getting it.
It turns out Friday’s 666-point Dow Jones plunge was just a prelude. On Monday, the Dow suffered its largest-ever drop in terms of points. It was down 1,600 at one point and ultimately lost 1,175.21 points, a 4.6% decline. According to Reuters, declines for the benchmark S&P 500 index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average were the biggest single-day percentage drops since August 2011. Monday’s crash ranks in the top-20 of all time Dow Jones drops in percentage terms.
Peter Schiff actually predicted a Monday crash in his podcast last Friday. Yesterday, he took to the microphone again, noting that even with the precipitous fall in the stock markets, the mainstream “fake financial news” remains clueless.
As the Brisbane Times puts it, “When the going gets tough, Germans Buy Aussie Gold.”
And they are doing it now.
Last fall we reported on Germany’s budding love affair with gold. It appears this is more than just a one-night fling.
