A Timeline Of Government Banking Data: 1964-2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I spent the last 24 hours minus some sleep time, cooking up this particular timeline connecting several elements and tying them into important world events affecting money and world trade. I am a huge fan of time lines that do this sort of thing.

I have in my files all sorts of timelines I have created over the years. This is how I 'remember' stuff. Knowing what is moving in tandem with other things is very important for all human activities move in a swarm like bees or fish or flocks of birds.

Often, when I get swamped with new data, putting them into one of my timelines brings things into focus rapidly and this exercise often surprises or even shocks me. Yesterday, while poking abou the web, I found a huge ad for weekly certificates of deposit. I was astonished to see how the rates being offered had risen rapidly and it suddenly reminded me of my own banking games in the mid-1970's: the search for the highest rates of return.

For the longest time, banks and such offered pathetic rates of return way below the rate of inflation but it seems this is collapsing and rates are shooting up the exact same way they did back in the Disco mania years!

So I went off to a bank and got an entire history of movements in these certificates of deposit and then decided to correlate it with the Federal Reserve's statistics for accumulation of consumer debts which includes mortgages. This ended up being many pages of data and instead of reducing it to charts like everyone does in many publications, I decided to present the raw data but set in a good timeline.

So today's page is an assemblage of these things and then I will analyze what it all means.

Click here of the Series Title: 1-Month Certificate of Deposit: Secondary Market Rate: Percent

Click here for the statistical releases of the Federal Reserve:

Click on all images to enlarge:

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I blocked in the rates and the debt accumulations with different colors to show rates of change. The debt accumulation numbers start out really small and it takes a year to add a billion dollars for the first years then, during the 1970's, the rate picks up despite inflation. I added my own $40,000 by getting a 9.45% mortgage in October, 1979. Looking at that chart, certificates were earning 13.6% rate of return! The mortgage I got was from a slumlord selling a brownstone that had a recent fire and he didn't want to fix it and I had zero hope of getting any loans from any banks anywhere. We both were happy with this deal. We both made money off it in the end! The amount of increase, namely, the number of dollars accumulated in debt that long, horrible decade, was the same as one month's accumulation of debt during this recent bubble where interest rates went down to absurd levels, totally unrealistic levels.

Due to weariness, I left out important milestones which I might add later such as the day when our savings rate went negative after 2002, for example. There are so many of these, the timeline would have taken me all week to draw up and I don't have that time...right now.

I should do a grand timeline that shows the trade deficit. These things are all tied to each other in obvious ways. This is why I get very annoyed when 'analysts' and 'pundits' give advice while ignoring these terrible and obvioius connections. It is like a man holding the leash of a very vicious dog claiming he doesn't know the leash is attached to Butch's spike collar!

If anyone has suggestions for improving this timeline, please drop me a line! I want to make a big spread that covers all these things!

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Comments

[frijoles junior]

The total debt column doesn't directly reflect what you found most interesting about it. I'd suggest since you found the rate of debt increase remarkable, that you replace the running debt total with the amount the debt increased over the previous year, either the absolute amount or the percentage increase.

Also, the relationship that you describe would be easier to convey with a line graph with time as the x axis and cd rates on the left y axis and consumer debt increase on the right y axis.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

True but I use the numbers all the time in different ways. Namely, in today's 'Free Trade' and the 'Money Matters' articles, I used the raw data.

And this isn't complete at all! I can see a huge graph in my future, one that has the actual numbers of all sorts of things running in tandem. With notations showing various events that impact the numbers.

The adding and subtracting of various things are easy to do when the data has been colored up the way I do it, I can locate the years of low or high interest rates at a glance, for example.

And the monthly numbers matter. Most graphs show only yearly averages. A real weakness when one wants to see the impact of various world events on the numbers.

[red sole]

He is a good friend that speaks well of us behind our backs.