Credit Scores Drop at Fastest Pace Since the Great Recession
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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Credit Scores
Debt
Economic Indicators
Credit scores are dropping at the fastest pace since the Great Recession, sparking concerns about the state of the economy, while commenters discuss the disconnect between this trend and the record-high stock market.
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Sep 16, 2025 at 4:33 PM EDT
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ID: 45267603Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:43:43 PM
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Are they buying bonds? Investing in foreign countries? Real estate? Gold? Crypto?
Holding cash is surely a losing bet I doubt we will see any deflation even if a shit ton of people lose their jobs.
But let's not forget that is someone is selling stock and getting USD, someone else is buying and giving USD, so the overall effect may be limited.
I'll be retiring in a few months, and because my house is paid off, my older ICE car is paid off, my new EV will be paid off soon, we have no state income tax and a great senior property tax relief program, and I don't have any expensive hobbies, my annual Social Security benefit will be about 50-60% more than my normal annual expenses. The difference should be enough to cover a new desktop computer every 5 years, a new iPhone every 4, a new iPad every 5, a new watch ever 4, a new car every 10, and deal with the occasional need to replace a major appliance with several hundred a month left over.
If Congress screws up Social Security by letting the trust fund run out I'll be old enough then that when I'm forced to start drawing on my retirement investments I probably won't have enough years left to actually run out of money, as long as I can reasonably preserve my investments until then. I don't even need my investments to beat inflation--it looks like I'll be fine even if they fall behind inflation as long as the inflation isn't too high for too long.
So it seems to me a good case can be made for getting out of stocks, or at least getting a significant majority out, and into something safer. The question then is where to put it that has very little risk of loss of principal but should at least try to counter inflation?
(not investing advice, educational purposes only)
If a kid comes down your street selling you lemons because their lemonade stand didn't work out, and they start selling them to you at $10/lb and you say, "Uh thanks kid, but I can buy them from Walmart for 75¢ each," and then another kid running a failed, overpriced lemonade venture comes around and tries to sell them to you for $5/lb and he clarifies that all the grocery stores near by are sold out and aren't getting any more lemons until next season, and CNN says there is a new insect killing off citrus trees, you're not timing anything when you look in your backyard, which has two producing lemon trees and you start offering them to your neighbors at $2/lb since no one can buy them from stores.
Now for the adults in the room, if 3 month treasury bills are yielding nearly the same as 10 year treasury bills,
...you’re not "timing the market" by preferring one over the other. You’re recognizing the price of risk and time. If lending money for ten years barely pays more than lending for three months, the market is telling you something about growth, inflation, and future policy rates. Choosing the shorter bill isn’t speculation. It’s responding to the information embedded in yields, just as choosing to sell lemons from your backyard isn’t speculation but simply adjusting to supply, demand, and alternatives available.
Isn't that all because of Big Tech? All the other Fortune 495, or 995 companies are mostly flat or down over the past few years. The AI bubble is effectively a private economic stimulus program. When that money stops, everyone's going to have a bad day.
You can use TradingView to look at a chart of SPX/DXY to see a chart of SPX adjusted with respect to DXY, IIRC you just enter ‘SPY/DXY’ into the ticker symbol field and you get a dollar-adjusted SPX chart.
So I stopped fixing it.
And guess what? Not having perfect credit made me such an unattractive target that it hasn't happened since. I write letters of dispute to the bureaus, but if they choose not to remove anything (the debt collectors are much easier to convince, by comparison), I suppose that's as far as I'll go until I need it.