More evidence that the appetite for credit in the U.S. is changing in new and very disturbing ways comes in the realization that student loan debt accounted for nearly all of the increase in outstanding consumer credit last year through November as reported in the Federal Reserve’s G.19 report the other day.
While student loans held by the federal government rose by $104 billion last year, all other forms of consumer credit (some of which, by the way, is private party student loan debt) increased by just $16 billion, due largely to the sharp decline in the first quarter. Cumulatively, federal government student loan debt rose almost 30 percent through November while all other outstanding consumer credit rose by less than 2 percent.
I don’t know where the student loan situation is headed but it’s definitely not good as detailed in this monstrous info-graphic the other day.