If we return to the 1952 economy, it's Dow 250...
By Caroline Salas and Michael McKee
July 21 (Bloomberg) -- For the first time since Harry S. Truman was in the White House, Americans are paying back their debts, a phenomenon that just might help keep interest rates low as the Treasury sells a record $2 trillion of bonds and rising unemployment increases U.S. savings.
While the proportion of consumers without jobs rose to 9.5 percent last month, household borrowing fell to 128 percent of the average family’s after-tax income in the first quarter from a record 133 percent in the same period a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The total debt of individuals, nonfinancial companies and federal, state and local governments grew at a 4.3 percent pace at the start of the year, down from a peak of 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimated.
“We’ve never seen a pullback like this,” Goldman’s chief U.S. economist, Jan Hatzius, said in an interview from his New York office. “We are seeing an adjustment, and it’s very painful and there’s a lot of collateral damage.”
The 0.7 percent contraction in debt among households and nonfinancial companies from January through March was the first since 1952, when Truman was president and the government began keeping the records, Hatzius said.
Consumer credit fell at an annual 1.6 percent rate in May to $2.52 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. Reduced spending may slow the recovery from the first global recession since World War II because U.S. households generate 17 percent of global gross domestic product, according to Sara Johnson, a managing director at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=arUgjalkdR2g
