Business

With credit card data in for Q2 2017, American households look to once again be on a collision course with the ever-elusive $1 trillion goal that narrowly escaped their clutches in 2008.  With nearly $940 billion in credit card debt outstanding, 2Q 2017 marked the second highest consumer revolving debt balance since the previous peak in 2008.  Per WalletHub:

All of which adds up to nearly $8,000 of credit card debt per household, up 5% YoY versus flat-ish wages.

Authored by Danielle DiMartino Booth via DiMartinoBooth.com,

Something is up, or more likely down, with the U.S. housing market. And the reconstruction after Hurricane Harvey may not do much to help.

Here's the evidence:

The latest take on home-builder sentiment showed that buyer traffic stubbornly remains in negative territory, despite some of the highest readings of the current cycle on builders' expectations for sales gains in the next six months.

The UN Security Council has unanimously voted to step up sanctions on North Korea in retaliation for the country’s recent sixth and most powerful nuclear test.

As we noted earlier, bitcoin has been unable to meaningfully reverse the drop that followed reports that Chinese authorities were planning to shut down local digital currency exchanges as part of a crackdown on ICOs. The news, which first surfaced in China’s state-owned Caixin media network, which presumably has sources deep within the Chinese government, sending bitcoin spiraling lower as investors feared that 23% of the market’s overall trading volume might soon evaporate.

Nearly 10 years to the day since Lehman Brothers failed, the US filed a civil lawsuit in federal court in Brooklyn against Paul Mangione, former Deutsche Bank head of subprime trading, whom it accused of defrauding investors in mortgage-backed securities sold before the financial crisis.