2017-10-23businessinsider.com

Unlike government debt, which can be rolled over continuously, consumer loans actually need to be paid back. And despite low official interest rates from the Federal Reserve, those often do not trickle down to financial products like credit cards and small-business loans.

Michael Lebowitz, the cofounder of the market-analysis firm 720 Global, says the US economy is already dangerously close to the edge.

"Most consumers, especially those in the bottom 80%, are tapped out," he told Business Insider. "They have borrowed about as much as they can. Servicing this debt will act like a wet towel on economic growth for years to come. Until wages can grow faster than our true costs of inflation, this problem will only worsen."

The Fed rate "often" does not trickle down to consumers?? Are they insane? It never does -- in fact interest rates have been jacked up on every form of consumer retail credit since 2008 and haven't come down. That and the Fed's interest-on-reserves subsidy to commercial banks has been floating them ever since; that's basically the whole "scam" (i.e., "the system").



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