The delinquency rate on loans is key in understanding banking. It answers one question: what percentage of loans is overdue for payment? The delinquency rate is by far the most useful indicator for “credit stress.” It seems, however, as if delinquency no longer counts. Few are paying attention to the quick and sudden rise of the delinquency rate. What does it tell us and is a new banking crisis imminent?
This Is What Happened after Janet Yellen Hiked the Fed Funds Rate in December
I have said it many times over and I will repeat it here: the last time around, it took Fed-chairman Alan Greenspan over two years and seventeen rate hikes to bring the Fed funds rate from a then all-time-low of 1% to 5.25%, before the US economy suffered the worst recession since the 1930s. We are not so lucky this time.Greenspan’s rate hikes didn’t affect delinquency rates straight away. Credit stress was subdued until a year after Greenspan’s last hike. Only in the first quarter of 2007, delinquency rates began to move higher. The reason is as clear as the water surrounding the Bahamas: in the years preceding the Great Recession credit growth was mainly focused on the US housing market........Today, the Federal Reserve is ignoring a very inconvenient truth: the global economy is much more fragile than the last time around. And we have no teaser rates in today’s subprime credit (unless we of course consider oil producers that hedged oil prices by buying futures as something akin to “teaser rates”)....To Read More...
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