Consumer Credit Misses, As Fed Magically Creates $1.5 Trillion In Net Worth Out Of Thin Air

Zero Hedge
June 11, 2012

That the just released consumer credit update for April missed expectations of a $11 billion increase is not much of a surprise. As noted earlier, the US consumer has once again resumed deleveraging:

April merely saw this trend continue with revolving credit declining by $3.4 billion, offset by the now traditional increase in student and subprime government motors car loans, which increased by $10 billion. In other words, following a modest increase in revolving consumer credit in March, we have another downtick, and a YTD revolving credit number which is now negative. Obviously the government-funded student loan bubble still has a ways to go.

No: all of this was expected. What was very surprising is that as noted in the earlier breakdown of the Z1, the entire consumer credit series was revised, with the cumulative impact resulting in a major divergence from the original data series. Why did the Fed feel compelled to revise consumer credit lower? Simple: as debt goes down, net worth goes up, assuming assets stay flat. Which in the Fed’s bizarro world they did! Sure enough, if one compares the pre-revision Household Net Worth data (which can still be found at the St. Louis Fed but probably not for long) with that just released Z.1, one notices something quite, for lack of a better word, magical. Ignoring the March 31 datapoint which does not exist for the pre-revision data set, at December 31, household net worth magically grew from $58.5 trillion in the original data set to $60.0 trillion in the revised one!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you “create” $1.5 trillion in net worth in this wonderfully wacky fiat world, with the wave of a magic wand, or the push of a revision button.

We hope all of you feel $1.5 trillion wealthier as of this post.

 

This article was posted: Monday, June 11, 2012 at 8:37 am

Tags: domestic news, financial

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