But student loans aren't the only burden
young people -- and the rest of us -- are carrying today
Today's
college seniors are also graduating with an average
of more than $4,000 in credit card debt -- and then entering an economy where only 46 percent of
their peers in the 18- to 24-year-old age group have jobs. That's the lowest percentage of employed
young people since the government began tracking these figures in 1948.
Plus, credit
card debt is another exploding area of risk for America's too-big-to-fail banks
-- and therefore for the federal government, i.e. the American people. In this country there are now more than 50
million American Express credit cards in circulation, along with 176 million
MasterCard credit cards and 261 million Visa credit cards. That's nearly half a billion active credit
cards from these three companies alone.
Credit cards
are unsecured debt, meaning that nothing has been put up as collateral if the
borrower defaults. Credit card holders
owed a reported $771 billion -- more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars
-- in the second quarter of 2011. The average amount owed by a
credit-card-holding household was more than $16,000.
The debt train is picking up speed
Lenders
wrote off about $250 billion in bad credit card debt between 2008 and 2011. Credit card debt increased by more than $36
billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, which was 30% more than the increase in
the same quarter of 2010 and more than twice the increase during the same
quarter in 2009. (Source: www.CardHub.com )
But banks
aren't pushing this kind of risky
debt on consumers anymore, are they? They've
learned their lesson, right? No,
actually they haven't. Credit card solicitations were up in 2011. And the worst offender was and is Citigroup,
the too-big-to-fail superbank that only exists because of Washington's
'bipartisan' agreement to allow the merger that created it. Last year Citi mailed out more credit-card solicitations than there are people in the
United States (346 million credit card offers in a nation of roughly 308
million people, according to the Wall Street Journal ).
In fact, the
total number of direct-mail solicitations mailed out by credit
card lenders in 2011 comes to nearly five billion!
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