The total amount of consumer credit has been increasing steadily in recent years. The following table gives the total U.S. outstanding consumer credit.

a. Find an equation for the least squares line, letting x equal the number of years since 2000.

b. Based on your answer to part a, at approximately what rate is the consumer credit growing per year?

c. Use your result from part a to predict the amount of consumer credit in the year 2015.

d. If this trend continues linearly, in what year will the total debt first exceed $4000 billion?

e. Find and interpret the correlation coefficient.

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Year Consumer credit (in billions of dollars) 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2219.5 2319.8 2415.0 2551.9 2592.1