>To assume the thankless Chicken Little role: The WSJ ran an ominous
>chart the other day, showing strong similarity between current US
>stock values and those of US equities in 1929 as well as Japanese
>equities a few years ago at their peak. How would US consumer
>indebtedness at present compare with that of the US in 1929 and of
>Japanese consumers at Japan's market top?
Consumer credit was pretty new in the 1920s, and debt levels were trivial compared to today's. I don't think consumer credit is all that big a deal in Japan, though Japanese households do have some formidable mortgage debt. But on balance, Japanese households have more savings than American ones. Japanese corporate debt is generally higher than U.S. corporate debt, though their institutional arrangements (cross-holdings, main banks, etc.) make high debt levels much easier to manage than ours. So I'd say that U.S. households are in more precarious financial shape than they were in 1929, or than Japanese households were in 1989. Which is why Alan G. can't let the bubble burst! Not, of course, that it is a bubble, Jordan.
Doug