AB Bankruptcies – the trend is your friend except at the end

crying baby

The latest numbers from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcies (OSB) for June 2015 indicate that business and consumer bankruptcies increased 433.3% and 19.5% respectively in comparison to June of 2014. Although these numbers are a single data point and one month does not make a trend we thought it still an important data point to bring to the attention of our readers none the less. Elsewhere, in more mainstream media they tend to quote the less scary Jan-Jun year to date increases of only 10.2% and 1.4% respectively.

As a collection agency with offices in Edmonton, Calgary and the GTA we recognize that the vast majority of consumers we inevitably end up dealing with are good people, with good intentions that have now simply arrived at the tipping point of having to either try to continue to rob Peter to pay Paul or, in the alternative, to make some hard choices in monthly budgeting in order to honour their outstanding financial obligations.

You can follow these numbers here on Alberta Economic Dashboard.

Although these more tame, not to mention more lagging, and thusly less useful number to those operators (our clients) making decisions every day on whether or not to further extend their customer credit accounts they do prove to be better suited to support the narrative of the alleged resiliency of the current Alberta economy.

Digging a little deeper and beyond the mainstream headlines allows us to provide our readers with information that will hopefully guide them to make better more prudent decisions before potentially becoming a statistic themselves. The problem is that to the unsuspecting once a new trend has already formed it may already be too late.

The trend is your friend except at the end.