Thursday, November 09, 2023

Credit Card DOOM??? Nope.

The Low-Information but very noisy pretend-Conservatives pundits (Hannity is one) are screaming Mimis over "credit card balances."  

They're up from several years ago, ya'know.  It's the End of the Republic, right?

Nope.

...Credit cards are the dominant consumer payments method in the US. Credit cards were used for $5.8 trillion in consumer transactions in 2022, up 18% year-over-year due to a surge in spending on travels and other services, and due to the surge in inflation at the time....

IOW, you typically use a credit card to make a purchase, NOT a debit card.

Then what happens??

You pay it off!

98% of you do, anyway.

But there are 2% (TWO percent) of you that don't.  That TWO percent is delinquent.  They are delinquent by quite a bunch of dollars:

... Credit card balances that transitioned into delinquency – 30 days or more past due at the end of the quarter – rose to 8.0% in Q3, higher than in recent years, but lower than any time before 2011 back to 2003....

... The fact that 98% of credit card users are current on their credit cards — either paying them off by due date or making at least the minimum payments on time — is another sign that consumers are not Drunken Sailors...

By the way, there's about $3 Trillion of unused credit attached to credit cards. 

Is the USA at DOOM?  Not yet.

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