 Hello and welcome to another episode of Minor Issues. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Today I'm going to talk about credit card debt. I hate credit card debt personally and I think people should make it a high priority to pay it all off for themselves. For purposes of this episode, it's a sign of economic trouble ahead. Credit card debt is like a boat anchor tied around your neck as you walk around the edge of a swimming pool. The least little slip and you could end up in the deep end. Statistically, an increase in credit card debt across the country could be a good sign that maybe there's a lot of college graduates who have brand new jobs and they're furnishing new apartments and houses, buying new cars or whatever. They're spending money because of good reasons, but it also can be viewed as a bad reason that people don't have enough money to pay their expenditures, even their necessities. Now the mainstream media does report on consumer debt and how bad it is in this country, but it always comes across to me as a plea for the government to do something about it. In a future episode, I'm going to show that it's various government policies that are the reason why Americans have built up such a massive amount of consumer debt with almost no savings. So let's take a look at what's happening right now with credit cards in the United States. As far as interest rates are concerned, before COVID for 25 years, the average rate on credit cards was less than 15 percent. It's actually down to 12 percent. There was a surge leading up to 2020 and COVID crisis, but now the interest rates on credit cards on average in the United States are over 22 percent. In terms of delinquency rates, things look okay, normally delinquency rates on credit card debt runs about 4 to 5 percent. During the Fed's zero interest rate policy and quantitative easing policies for banks, delinquency actually fell to 2 percent, but now delinquency rates are on the increase even though they're at a pretty low level. How much have the large banks issued in credit card debt on our cards? Well, back in normal times, it was about $200 billion, but with the zero interest rate policy of the Fed and its quantitative easing programs, credit card debts issued by large banks went above $500 billion. And now, just recently, they hit a new all-time record of $750 billion. And if we include all credit cards and other revolving credit for individuals, that figure has now crossed the $1 trillion mark. So Americans have an enormous amount of credit card debt. The interest rate on that debt has risen sharply with the Fed's increases in interest rates. So a lot of American consumers are big-time debtors paying very high interest rates. At the same time, the personal savings boom that hit during COVID when we got all those government checks, it's over. And personal savings and the personal savings rate have returned to low levels experienced before the COVID crisis. So we have less savings to deal with this mounting debt problem involving credit cards. And we have other problems of the government increasing its debt of student loan payments set to renew and other economic debts out there that are going to be coming due and suppressing what the Keynesians call aggregate demand in the economy. So the recent increase in credit card debt should be a concern of it all and negative sign of things to come.