The unprecedented growth in student and federal debt still hasn’t been enough to boost Z1 out of credit disinflation:
Time reports that American students and grads were carrying $1.08 trillion in student loan debt at the end of 2013. This compares to just $253 billion a decade earlier. Aggregate debt grew 10% in the past year alone. By comparison, overall debt grew just 43% in the last decade and 1.6%
over the past year.’ About 70% of students graduate with some amount of
debt, and the average amount owed is $29,400.
This should finish off the housing market once and for all, barring mass Chinese immigration. That $1.08 trillion now represents 1.9 percent of total credit market debt outstanding and a whopping 8.3 percent of total household debt. Most of it is going to be defaulted, or rather, would have been had that not been made illegal by Congress and the Bush administration.