Business Briefing: Borrowing Rises for Autos and Student Loans

Posted by Unknown on Friday, March 7, 2014

HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 01:14:34 GMT Server: Apache Set-Cookie: NYT-S=0Mln7FO03A/mLDXrmvxADeHIZnBjjP5O7XdeFz9JchiAIUFL2BEX5FWcV.Ynx4rkFI; expires=Mon, 07-Apr-2014 01:14:34 GMT; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com Location: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/your-money/borrowing-rises-for-autos-and-student-loans.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0 Content-Length: 0 nnCoection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Apache Cache-Control: no-cache Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 43956 Accept-Ranges: bytes Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 01:14:34 GMT X-Varnish: 548526655 548526553 Age: 2 Via: 1.1 varnish Connection: keep-alive X-Cache: HIT

Your Money |Borrowing Rises for Autos and Student Loans

http://nyti.ms/1dADcyC

Your Money |Business Briefing

Consumers increased their borrowing in January on autos and student loans but cut back on their credit card use. Consumer borrowing rose $13.7 billion in January after an even larger $15.9 billion rise in December, the Federal Reserve reported on Friday. The category that includes auto and student loans increased $13.9 billion while the category that covers credit cards fell $226 million, the third time in the last five months that credit card loans have declined. The big overall increase pushed total borrowing to a record $3.11 trillion. Gains in borrowing are seen as encouraging signs that people are more confident and willing to take on debt to finance consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of economic activity. That has been the trend over the last year. Credit card borrowing has been rising more slowly. Borrowing on credit cards plunged after the recession. Even with recent gains, credit card debt in January was still 16.2 percent below its peak above $1 trillion reached in July 2008. It stood at $856.2 billion in January, up just 0.9 percent from a year ago.