JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Thursday, July 24, 2025

US consumer credit surprises with US$3.28b drop in July

by

20120910

Con­sumer bor­row­ing in the US un­ex­pect­ed­ly de­creased in Ju­ly for the first time in al­most a year, re­strained by a sec­ond straight de­cline in cred­it card debt. The US$3.28 bil­lion drop fol­lowed a re­vised US$9.8 bil­lion jump the pre­vi­ous month that was big­ger than first es­ti­mat­ed, the Fed­er­al Re­serve said to­day in Wash­ing­ton. Econ­o­mists pro­ject­ed a US$9.2 bil­lion rise, ac­cord­ing to the me­di­an fore­cast in a Bloomberg sur­vey. Re­volv­ing cred­it, which in­cludes cred­it card spend­ing, de­creased US$4.82 bil­lion, the most since April 2011. The drop in cred­it-card bor­row­ing co­in­cides with a slow­down in hir­ing this year and a rise in con­sumer pes­simism that in­di­cate house­holds are wary of tak­ing on debt. Em­ploy­ers added few­er work­ers to pay­rolls than fore­cast in Au­gust, while a gain in av­er­age hourly earn­ings from a year ear­li­er matched the small­est in­crease since records be­gan in 2007. "All the un­cer­tain­ty next year with the fis­cal cliff and what peo­ple's tax sit­u­a­tions are go­ing to be like-I don't fore­see a sce­nario where moods are lift­ed to the point where per­son­al spend­ing picks up a lot," Thomas Si­mons, a mon­ey mar­ket econ­o­mist at Jef­feries & Com­pa­ny Inc in New York, said be­fore the re­port. "We'll prob­a­bly just con­tin­ue to mud­dle along here, through the end of the year, at least." Es­ti­mates in the Bloomberg sur­vey of 37 econ­o­mists ranged from gains of $5 bil­lion to $15 bil­lion af­ter a pre­vi­ous­ly re­port­ed June in­crease of US$6.46 bil­lion. (Bloomberg)


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored