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)