Happy Thanksgiving everybody!  We hope your holiday was as filled with good food, family, friends, and involuntary naps (aka food comas) as our was.  We learned two things anecdotally this holiday season:

1. Gone are the days when being at your grandmother’s house in the middle of rural Maryland means you’re disconnected from everything; it does, however, mean that your cell data lasts approximately a day and a half.
   
2. The eye test at Best Buy on Black Friday indicated that people apparently have money to spend.  
   

They don’t necessarily know what they’re buying (yours truly having had to try and explain the difference between “Roku TV” and “Smart TV” to confused shoppers - apparently blue plaid flannel is close enough to the Best Buy employee uniform?), but they’re buying.  And the preliminary numbers back this up: apparently, American consumers spent over $6B on Thanksgiving/Black Friday, up 15% from last year.

That must be a good thing, right?  Yeah!  It is.  Probably.  Increased sales mean increased revenues for companies, which can be translated into higher (or at least supported) stock prices, even as profit margins have been falling over the last couple years.

More importantly to us, however, increased sales *should* indicate something about people having more disposable income, which is categorically a good thing.  We say *should* with little asterisk offsets because in this day and age one doesn’t have to have current disposable income to purchase something.  They could purchase it with debt (credit cards), and essentially borrow from future disposable income.

And, in point of fact, that is exactly what has been going on for the past several years.  Enjoy these charts  from the NY Federal Reserve (interactive up-to-date data available here, for anyone interested):

The general trend has continued through this year - total household debt is at all time highs now, and the main drivers of this are student loan debt (up 100% since 2009) and auto loan debt (up almost 60% since 2009).  This is not necessarily an issue in and of itself, given that the charts are in absolute dollars and not percentages.  However, real wage growth has been mostly nonexistent for most of the population, causing us to cast a moderate amount of side eye on that Black Friday shopping.

So.  What does your balance sheet look like?