If you believe that the number of hard inquiries showing up in your credit report is hurting your credit score, you might be wondering whether it is possible to remove these from your credit report. A hard inquiry or also referred to as a “hard pull” takes place when a lender pulls your credit report …
Can You Really Remove Hard Inquiries From Your Credit Report? Read More »
If you fall behind your auto loan payments or defaulted on a car title loan, your lender typically has the right to repossess or take back your car. A repossession is a way for lenders to recoup your debt. When this happens, not only will you lose your mode of transportation, it will also damage …
How Can I Remove A Repossession From My Credit Report? Read More »
If you’re drowning in debt and you don’t have any way out, bankruptcy could be the only option that could save you and give your finances a fresh start. It’s an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start over with the hopes that you’ll make smarter financial decisions this time around. However, many people …
How To Get A Bankruptcy Off Your Credit Report Early? Read More »
A concern that we highlighted in yesterday’s post is that the only way the U.S. economy can generate significant consumer spending is through aggressive lending to borrowers with low credit scores, eventually wrecking their credit and forcing them to struggle to repair their credit. Here is more evidence supporting that view. In the chart below, we plot …
Census retail sales for May came out today, and they missed the consensus forecast slightly on the downside. But there is another pattern that may be more concerning. Let’s take a closer look at what has been going on with household spending. First, new auto purchases have been an important driver of household spending for …
It seems crazy to have such a heated debate on facts that are so easily measurable. Here we use the SCF from 1992 to 2010 to show the pretty unambiguous rise in wealth inequality in the United States. The housing boom hid the rise in inequality to some degree, but the crash in house prices …
Great Recession happened in December 2007, where millions of people lost their job, house prices going down, people started looking at how to fix your credit, and economies went downhill. But did you know that some recession proof industries not just survived but somehow thrive during those unfortunate times compared to the negative impact it …
In a series of speeches, Federal Reserve Governor Jeremy Stein emphasized the importance of financial stability concerns in monetary policy-making. But how does one measure whether threats to financial stability are lurking? Put differently, can we know that there is a credit bubble about to burst? In his speeches, Stein cites the work of two Harvard Business School …
Lenders are showing an increasing willingness to take risk, especially over the last two years. One measure of risk tolerance that economists typically track in corporate bond markets is the credit spread–the difference between interest rates for risky debt versus safe debt. But for the household sector, it is much more informative to track the quantity of …
Our post three weeks ago on the weather and auto sales argued that bad winter weather was responsible for the slowdown in consumer spending. It was likely to be a greater contributor than factors such as improving credit scores. We used variation across states in January temperature and showed that states where January was very cold had …
