Gluskin Sheff analyst David Rosenberg says the consumer is still toast, housing is still down, and everyone is delinquent on everything.
Real GDP growth is stalled, Rosenberg says in a note to investors.
“The steepest four-quarter slide in the post-WWII era was followed by the wimpiest rebound,” Rosenberg notes.
Housing is still holding the economy back, Rosenberg says, more than three years after the onset of the collapse.
“If (housing) prices sink 15 percent from here, which is a possibility, and the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we’re back where we were before — in a nightmare,” Rosenberg says.
Moreover, consumer confidence is still lower today than it was at the depths of despair in each of the past three recessions dating back to the early 1980s, and declining tax revenues aren’t doing a thing to help matters.
“Sales taxes are down 9 percent … and income taxes off 12 percent,” Rosenberg points out.
“If that is what a recovery does to fiscal finances, imagine what the backdrop will look like if the economy actually does pull a ‘double dip.’”
Add to that the facts that one in seven Americans have a mortgage in arrears and bank-wide credit charge-offs now exceed 10 percent, and it’s clear the economy hasn’t improved.
November charge-offs on U.S. credit cards rose about half a percentage point to 10.56 percent, halting a two-month run of improvement, according to Moody's Investors Service’s new Credit Card Indices report.
The delinquency rate for November also rose, to 6.2 percent.
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