March Consumer Credit

Updated 05-Jun-09 15:13 ET

About this release

Highlights

Key Factors

Big Picture

Consumers have been retrenching, and that includes credit. This is not likely to change until employment and income trends improve. The trend could be further worsened by government intervention to reduce prices (interest rates) that credit card companies can charge. This may lead to lower supply of credit if the companies perceive that price restrictions would lead to losses amongst high credit risks.

Category	APR	MAR	FEB	JAN	DEC
Total Credit	-$15.7B	-$16.5B	-$8.1B	$7.0B	-$5.6B
Revolving	-$8.6B	-$8.8B	-$9.7B	-$0.5B	-$6.6B
Nonrevolving	-$7.1B	-$7.7B	$1.6B	$7.5B	$1.1B

Release Details

Consumer Credit

Importance (A-F): This release merits a D-.
Source: Federal Reserve.
Release Time: 15:00 ET on the fifth business day of the month (data for two months prior).
Raw Data Available At: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/G19/Current/.

This monthly measure of consumer debt is volatile and subject to massive revisions. It is also released well after every other consumer spending indicator, including weekly chain store sales, auto sales, consumer confidence, retail sales, and personal consumption. For these reasons, the market almost never reacts to the consumer credit report.

Consumer credit is broken down into three categories: auto, revolving (ie, credit card), and other. Since we already have indications on total consumer spending well before this release, there is little to be gained from learning what portion of spending was financed through acquisition of debt. Periods of strong spending can be accompanied by relatively weak credit growth and vice versa, so this measure fails even as a coincident or lagging indicator.

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