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Posted on 01/06/2009 7:42:33 AM PST by BGHater
More than 1 million sought protection last year and filings are expected to rise in 2009.
U.S. consumer bankruptcy filings jumped nearly 33% in 2008 amid a recession that's expected to keep filings rising into the new year.
Overall consumer filings reached 1.06 million last year, up from 801,840 in 2007, according to data collected by the National Bankruptcy Research Center and published by the American Bankruptcy Institute, a research group based here.
The recession that began in December 2007 has stretched many consumers who are turning to bankruptcy protection amid job losses, mortgage foreclosures and heavy personal debt.
"Consumers are under great financial stress with no immediate end in sight," said Samuel Gerdano, the institute's executive director. "We expect the upward spike in personal bankruptcies to continue in 2009."
The 2008 rate of increase fell short of the 40% rise recorded in 2007, and the annual total in both those years is still far short of the more than 2 million recorded in 2005 alone. A law that took effect in October 2005 made personal bankruptcy filings more difficult and sharply curtailed filings in 2006 to about 573,000, the lowest level since 1998.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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But according to many here, the economy is doing just swell.
Yep.
This is one of the reasons why the GOP is out of power.
Because Republicans refused to read the internals of BEA, BLS and other economic reports, they came into 2008’s election season being perceived as clueless on the economy.
And, to not put too fine a point on it, they were.
The GOP was content to just point an enraged finger at the headline numbers and yell “You’re being duped about the economy by the liberal mainstream media!”
Now we’re finally seeing the numbers from the BLS/BEA/etc internals boil down to the bottom line... and lo, we see that those of us who weren’t drinking the Bush Kool-aid were on to something here and there: that the economy wasn’t all that great during the second Bush administration.
Doesn’t make much sense...Unemployment is about 6.5%...but 33% can’t pay their bills?? Maybe they’re living beyond their means...Ya think??
“Unemployment is about 6.5%...”
Those getting unemployment benefits plus the number the government “feels” are seeking jobs is 6.5%.
Yep, too many have bought into the liberal Madoff philosophy - something for nothing... and if that doesn't work - go to court. Sue someone or declare bankruptcy - then bow before the gods of the New York Times.
One of the things that the GOP just has not gotten their heads around is how the BLS stats and definition of unemployment was changed in the Clinton years. You simply cannot look at the headline unemployment number today and equate that with the unemployment numbers from prior to the Clinton years. For example, inside the BLS employment report is a measurement called “U-6” — which includes a much more “man on the street” definition of ‘unemployed’ - not the strict academic sense of ‘employed.’
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils71.pdf
Look at “Chart 1.”
So, what’s U-6 have to say today? It says that things are not good. Things are sure as heck not “6.5% unemployment good.”
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2009/jan/wk1/art02.htm
This is why conservatives need to put down the newspaper, turn off CNBC and other cleavage-n-claptrap shows, pull up the statistics in the .pdf file and start reading, drilling down on the individual components of these reports. The headline numbers just don’t deliver politically viable results any more.
Throughout Bush’s second term, if one pulled up the Fed stats, we could see that homeowners were cashing out more and more equity, that unsecured credit borrowing continued to go up, up, up, etc. The high rate of consumer consumin’ was not driven by fundamental wage growth. It was fueled by debt. This is simply not sustainable and was never going to be sustainable.
The data were there to see for all. Your tax dollars paid for it. But because we have candidates and spin-doctors in the GOP who simply cannot get their head around numbers (and I blame the number of idiotic liberal arts majors infecting the GOP for this deficiency), we got our clocks cleaned - twice.
It is time to start cracking open the books and studying what is REALLY going on in the economy and finance. The subject is essential to any political future for conservatives.
Oh, and above all, we need to banish people like Kudlow and Luskin to Siberia.
“Because Republicans refused to read the internals of BEA, BLS and other economic reports, they came into 2008’s election season being perceived as clueless on the economy.”
Yeah, the ECONOMY should always be one our top three issues on this forum and elsewhere. At times it seems like the least important thing, which leaves an incredible opening for the dems.
Worse than that...remember in July when Gramm (one of the instigators of this debacle) came out and called the American people a bunch of "whiners?"
I actually called my boss that day and told him that McCain had just lost the election.
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