China ghost cities and real estate correction: China’s GDP and individual household wealth is heavily tied to real estate. What happens when a correction hits?
China has had one of the wildest real estate sectors of any large global economy. Chinese real estate values have appreciated dramatically largely shutting out regular workers in the country. It is an interesting situation. You hear countless stories of young males trying to find a potential mate and given the restrictive one child policy, […]
Collection nation: One out of three consumers have debts in collection over the past year. A total of 77 million Americans are having problems managing their debt. 22 million consumers have zero credit.
A recent report by the Urban Institute and Encore Capital Group’s Consumer Credit Research Institute has found some rather startling news about consumer debt in the United States. Over one third of consumers had some sort of debt in collection over the past year. Of course this coincides with the struggling employment growth that many […]
Driving our way into poverty: Subprime auto debt continues to expand while domestic auto production remains weak.
Americans love their cars. Urban sprawl with poorly designed city centers has made driving a near necessity for most people. During the credit crisis, one of the problems that occurred was that too many loans were being made to people that had no ability of paying their debt back. We see this trend in full […]
When does college become too expensive? Tuition growth continues to outpace income growth and the student debt bubble continues to expand with the vast majority of debt going to the young.
When does college become too expensive? Will there be a bell going off like during a boxing match? What is the price tag that makes getting an education too expensive? It is obvious in the current economy that many prospective students cannot afford a college education without going into joint breaking levels of debt. Many […]