...... The main fuel for the spending was easy access to credit. Banks and other financial institutions were willing to lend households ever increasing amounts of money. Any particular individual might default, but in the aggregate, loans to consumers were viewed as low-risk and profitable.
The subprime crisis, however, marks the beginning of the end for the long consumer borrow-and-buy boom. The financial sector, wrestling with hundreds of billions in losses, can no longer treat consumers as a safe bet. Already, standards for real estate lending have been raised, including those for jumbo mortgages for high-end houses. Credit cards are still widely available, but it may only be a matter of time before issuers get tougher.
What comes next could be scary—the largest pullback in consumer spending in decades, perhaps as much as $200 billion to $300 billion, or 2%-3% of personal income. Reduced access to credit will combine with falling real estate values to hit poor and rich alike. "We're in uncharted territory," says David Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch (MER ), who's forecasting a mild drop in consumer spending in the first half of 2008. "It's pretty rare we go through such a pronounced tightening in credit standards."
Don't expect the spending to come to a screeching halt, however. Remember the stock market peak in early 2000? It wasn't until a year later that tech spending fell off the cliff and the sector didn't hit bottom until 2003. The same delayed impact holds true here. The latest retail sales numbers, which showed a soft 0.2% gain in October, suggest that spending may hold up through this holiday season.
Next year, though, will be much tougher. The consumer slump may be deep and long-lasting, and the political implications could be enormous. "There's growing evidence that the economy will become a dominant, if not the dominant issue of 2008," says independent pollster John Zogby. "It's even to the point where the numbers of people who say Iraq is the No. 1 issue are starting to decline."Truth is, economists have been complaining about excessive borrowing and spending since the early 1980s. Journalists began writing about consumers being "tapped out," "profligate," and "spendthrift." Magazines and newspapers regularly ran stories about debt-ridden Americans not being able to buy holiday presents for their kids.
But no matter how many times economists predicted the demise of the consumer, the spending continued. The latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the personal savings rate—the share of income left after consumption—fell from 12% in 1981 to just over zero today. And debt service, which is the share of income going to principal and interest on debt, kept rising. Those numbers aren't dead-on accurate: The data has been revised endlessly, and the BEA includes outlays on higher education as consumption rather than saving, which would seem odd to families who have socked away thousands of dollars for college.
But the story line is clear. Consumers' outlays have outpaced the growth of their income for a long time. Lenders learned how to judge risk and expand the pool of potential borrowers—and the party was on. "The most important factor has been that it is easier to borrow," says Christopher D. Carroll, a Johns Hopkins University economist.
While many companies struggled in the 2001 recession and afterward, American consumers just kept borrowing. "In 2001-02, the credit window was open for anyone who had a pulse," says Merrill's Rosenberg."The consumer is retrenching, bigtime," says Richard Hastings, economic adviser to the Federation of Credit & Financial Professionals. "It's starting to get to the point where people are achieving levels of debt that are getting uncomfortable."
The question, though, is just how much consumers will restrain their free-spending ways. Research by economist Carroll suggests that every $1 decline in house prices lops about 9 cents off of spending. The current value of residential housing is about $21 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. So if home prices fall by 10%, as many people expect, that would lead to roughly a $200 billion hit to spending over the next couple of years. A 15% tumble in home prices would produce a $300 billion pullback in spending, or about 3% of personal income.
That accords well with calculations by BEA economists. They figure that households took out $340 billion in cash from mortgage and home-equity financing in 2006. That source of funding could largely disappear over the next couple of years......
So that 2%-3% decline in income directly hits the wallet and the discretionary purchases that households actually control. One logical place for cutbacks is apparel. Autos will be hit. Another target could be luxury items, a surprisingly big part of discretionary spending. Pamela N. Danziger, president of Unity Marketing in Stevens, Pa., conducts a quarterly online survey of adults earning $75,000 a year and up. She found that people who make more than $150,000 have been unaffected, but the rest are cutting back on luxury goods such as fashion accessories..... Still, the consumer recession will hit some parts of the economy harder than others. Particularly at risk are retailers, who have already seen sharp declines in their stock prices since the extent of the subprime crisis became clear.....
.. executives from Capital One Financial (COF ), Bank of America (BAC ), Discover Card (DFS ), Washington Mutual (WM ), and others have told investors in recent conference calls that they are using more caution in extending credit. Chief Financial Officer Gary L. Perlin of Capital One, the nation's No. 5 card issuer, says he believes last year's historically low defaults by credit-card holders were partly driven by the real estate boom, particularly in previously hot housing markets such as Arizona, California, and Florida. Those benefits also have seemed to run out. As a result, says Perlin, Capital One is tightening lending standards and limiting credit lines...... The politicians can say what they want. Recession or no, Americans had better get ready to tighten their belts.www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/...+news+index_top+story
Mark Hulbert is the founder of Hulbert Financial Digest in Annandale, Va. He has been tracking the advice of more than 160 financial newsletters since 1980.

