....to parody a title of one of my favourite authors HE Bates, as well as some poet or other. You'll have to read the lot on Michael Snyder's Substack, it's just too long to copy here.
(A short summary might be "America is stuffed")
"Consumers are drowning in debt...etc"
"U.S. consumers have piled up the largest mountain of household debt in the history of the world. If the federal government was not almost 36 trillion dollars in debt, the fact that U.S. households are nearly 18 trillion dollars in debt would be making a lot more headlines. Sadly, our entire society is absolutely saturated with debt at this point. Government debt on all levels is spiraling out of control, corporate debt has ballooned to absurd levels, and consumers have been gorging on debt as if there will never be any consequences. Unfortunately, a time of reckoning has arrived, and it is going to be incredibly painful.
On Wednesday, we learned that total credit card debt has surged to a brand new record high of 1.17 trillion dollars…Collectively, Americans now owe a record $1.17 trillion on their credit cards, according to a new report on household debt from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.Credit card balances rose by $24 billion in the third quarter of 2024 and are 8.1% higher than a year ago.Needless to say, incomes have not increased by 8.1 percent over the past year.So our credit card balances are growing faster than our paychecks are, and that is a problem.
Meanwhile, total student loan debt has reached a brand new record high of 1.61 trillion dollars. If you can believe it, a whopping 30 percent of all student loan borrowers have “gone without food or medicine due to their monthly bills”…
