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The US does not have historically high credit card debts right now, and it isn't particularly high relative to incomes either.

I think part of it might be that credit cards added planning features that have guaranteed fees to compete with BNPLs.




Isn't the US at record high levels of credit card debt right now?


Not relative to income/GDP, which is how you'd know what can actually be paid off.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N

There was an uptick in failure to pay credit card bills recently (don't have a graph) but that just means it went from "unusually low" to "same as 2019".


GDP calculations in the U.S. are not relevant to debt holders. It would be like saying everyone in the U.S. is wealthy when it's the top 1% that own the vast majority of that wealth.


That is not /more/ true in 2023 than it was in 2019, so it isn't a problem for a quick look at trends. I would've linked a median household graph if I had one, but there are some median numbers here and they're good; keyword is "leverage ratio".

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf

(Also, you can't compare GDP and wealth, and income inequality has been decreasing in the US in the last few years.)


"U.S. income inequality grew through pandemic years" https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-income-inequality-rose-3...


Story is wrong about this, I think they misread it.

See Dube: https://x.com/arindube/status/1724147807563477440

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010

It also might be a difference in wages vs. income, because income counts welfare programs and those were unusually generous (but temporary) in 2020; we should bring that back but it's not due to the economy getting worse.

But you can see it says debt ratios are low.

> Median household leverage - measuring a family's total debt against its total assets - sank to the lowest in 20 years at 29.2%. Meanwhile, the median payment-to-income ratio dropped to a record-low 13.4%, and the fraction of families with payment-to-income ratios greater than 40% fell 0.9 percentage point to 6.5%, also a record low.




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