It just got worse

This one is no doubt out of sequence. It should have come before mine of 22 and 23 September. But it was unfinished and I kinda skipped over it, hoping for the best.

Now I've changed my mind. The thing is still unfinished, and it seems unfinishable. So I'm saying as much, and getting that out of the way, and then I'm gonna take another look. We'll see what happens.

At FRED, Table D3 (Debt Outstanding by Sector) shows the components of domestic nonfinancial debt. My thought is to add up the components in order to verify that I'm using the right data.

However, I want to go with the FRED Blog and their On household debt of 12 Jan 2015. They assemble household debt from components:

The red line is more complex because it has to be constructed: We need the two components of household debt (consumer credit and mortgages) ...

I looked at the FRED Blog post on my old blog, in a post called "No good answers":

In On household debt at the FRED Blog, for household debt they use "consumer credit" plus "home mortgages" as a measure of household debt. I always use CMDEBT. What's the difference?

Graph #1: Blue is CMDEBT. Red is what the FRED Blog used.

Ooh, that's a fair amount. I was expecting to say "not much" but it is more than I thought. It varies, but my number is in the neighborhood of 9 or 10 percent higher than their number...

That's an unacceptible discrepancy, and one I never did resolve. It resurfaced the other day when I ran across the old FRED Blog post again. But this time I'm prepared: I have Table D3 at the ready.

Using the links in Table D3, I selected the total for domestic nonfinancial debt (line 1). I want him to be a wide blue line, first on the graph. The components I will total up and show as a narrow red line. If the red line runs down the middle of the wide blue line, I'll be happy and say red and blue are equal

 

 

 

 

 

 

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14 November 2021

I can finally finish this post. This morning I found the missing dataset:

Households and Nonprofit Organizations; Debt Securities and Loans Excluding One-to-Four-Family Residential Mortgages and Consumer Credit; Liability, Level (BOGZ1FL154104905Q)

Link to the dataset:  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL154104905Q

Link to updated Graph #1:  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ISPs