Stocks hit record high on sagging performance, higher debt.

Jon Government

There’s something completely ridiculous happening around the world right now.
We can start in the United Kingdom, where the FTSE-100 stock market index hit an all-time high yesterday of 7454.
Simultaneously the British government released statistics yesterday showing that debt judgments and bankruptcy filings across the UK soared 35% in the first quarter of 2017 to the highest level in a decade.
British consumers are on a debt binge, borrowing (and now defaulting) at record levels.
This all sounds pretty sustainable.
Across the pond in the Land of the Free, the US stock market also hit a record high yesterday.
Simultaneously, consumer credit (i.e. DEBT) in the US is also at an all-time high of $3.8 trillion.
Even more specifically, margin debt, which is the amount of money that investors borrow to buy stocks, is at an all-time high.
Think about that: investors are borrowing record amounts of money to buy stocks at all-time highs.

This post was published at Sovereign Man on May 16, 2017.