Consumer debt crunch and division by two

Shelvers at aol.com Shelvers at aol.com
Sat Jun 6 08:49:23 PDT 1998


Business Week (Jan 1, 1998, pg 34) has a small article entitled "The Poor Get Deeper in Debt", which gives slight details on a study by Peter Yoo, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Based on the Fed's triennial Survery of Consumer Finances, Yoo explains that households below the median income level increased their percentage of overall credit debt from 24% in '83 to 30% in '95. In addition, BW reports that the average credit card debt for the "bottom half" rose 14% annually from '92 to '95, vs. 8% annually for the "upper half".

Evidently, Yoo sees something to smile about in that the number of households with credit cards grew only 2.4% a year from '92 to '95, arguing that people who already use credit cards "presumably know how to handle them better than people using them for the first time".

My question is this: Does anyone know how to obtain a copy of this Survey of Consumer Finances or the data therein? My feeble research-surfing attempts have failed.

Perhaps when dealing with such large numbers as Mr. Yoo, one appreciates using tiny denominators. However, I would like to break these #'s into deciles. I can understand why from Business Weeks' view, defining the "poor" as the "bottom half" is enough to wield a general understanding ( and a neat bar graph), but I'd like to further quantify this information.

Jason Chappell



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