While on the surface the US economy has been chugging along from GDP-crashing "snow in the winter" to GDP-cratering "warmer|cooler than expected weather in the spring|summer|fall", with bouts of GDP-boosting inventory accumulation inbetween, in recent months two very disturbing trends about that all important dynamo behind the economy, the US consumer, have emerged.

On one hand we wrote three weeks ago that a "shocking" 77 million, or one third, of Americans face debt collectiors: a statistic which crushes any suggestion that US household credit is substantially improving based on trends in 30, 60, or 90-day delinquency, as it means that the real pain is not at the near-end of the default/delinquency timetable, but the far end, which incidentally has just as dire an impact on one's credit score as a plain vanilla default (and explains why none other than Fair Issac has jumped in to "adjust" its credit methodology to artificially boost FICO scores of these millions of Americans).