American consumers got rid of credit card debt after the crash of 2008. But this chart shows a steady re-leveraging. We’re particularly interested by people increasing their leverage after the noteworthy election of 2016. What do you think it means?
Extreme poverty dropping rapidly around the world
Good news from Oxford researcher Max Roser, who lightly chided the news media to frame a headline that could suggest that more than 100,000 people left extreme poverty yesterday alone. Newspapers could have had the headline “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday” Every day in the last 25 years. pic.twitter.com/oKxco1oVHL — Max Roser (@MaxCRoser) …
US Payroll Employment Trends, 2008-2017
It’s been a good run, but somewhere between hurricanes and Donald Trump actively threatening tariffs or war every couple of days, payroll job growth is off.
Retail spending in the United States continues to increase, 1992-2017
Courtesy of Calculated Risk, fine purveyors of macroeconomic data charts, we have the 25 year trend for retail spending in the United States. Retail is shifting in myriad other ways other than total spending, but the quarter-century trend is an incremental, constant increase. Not pictured: the bifurcation of “Dollar Stores” and luxury “experience” retail, consolidation of big box “category killers,” …
New housing starts in the United States, 2008-2017
Further to the trends in high confidence by homebuilders, check out these trends in single- and multiple-unit housing starts. There’s no question – the US housing sector is at pre-2008-crisis levels in terms of new housing starts. The questions we have are about whether the fundamentals that blew up the housing market in 2008 have been repeated. We know that US …