Measuring Levels of Debt in the Eighth District's Key Metro Areas

In a prior Regional Economist article, we introduced data that can be used to evaluate consumer debt developments in the Eighth District.1 The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) is based on an anonymized 5 percent sample of credit files provided by the credit monitoring company Equifax. [...]this article reports on consumer debt levels by type of debt for the largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the District: St. Louis; Memphis, Tenn.; Louisville, Ky.; and Little Rock, Ark. ENDNOTES 1 Headquartered in St. Louis, the Eighth Federal Reserve District includes all of Arkansas and parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee. 2 We express all debt adjusted for inflation using the personal consumption expenditures chain-type price index. 3 The 90-day delinquency rate is found by dividing the volume of loan payments 90 or more days past due by the total volume of loan payments.