It was always stupid to count COVID forbearance as delinquency, at least in the headline delinquency rate.
If I wanted to track this closely, I’d exclude forbearance requests from employed people with high credit.
A bunch of people ignorantly or accidentally signed up for COVID forbearance, and banks encouraged it. It reduced prepayment risk when its safe credit clients signed up, and the US Gov was leaning on Chase and WFC to pump up forbearance signups.
In retrospect, the program was successful, and the stimulus package the US passed during COVID was well designed compared to Europe and Japan.
