What this actually is
How much households owe on credit cards, car loans and personal loans, and what share of those borrowers are behind on payments.
Why it matters to a person
Delinquencies rise from the bottom of the income distribution upward. Subprime auto and credit-card arrears are therefore the earliest visible crack in the consumer story, months before aggregate spending data shows anything.
For scale
Card balances passed $1.1 trillion in 2024. Delinquency transitions rose fastest among under-30 borrowers — a cohort also carrying student debt. The 2008 sequence went subprime mortgages, then cards, then prime.
How to read a release
Reading it
Watch the transition rate into delinquency rather than the stock of debt. Balances rise with inflation and population; the transition rate does not.
The mechanism
Rising card and auto delinquencies are the first crack in the consumer story.
What to watch: Fed G.19; NY Fed household debt report. Arrives monthly / quarterly; the effect typically lasts months. Impact tier 2 — Directional: Moves the index for days or weeks. Scheduled data releases, policy decisions, global spillovers, and the prices of money and energy. This is the tier most professional attention is spent on.
Its neighbourhood
Everything this entry connects to directly. Click any point to follow it.
What it moves next
Documented transmission: when this moves, these tend to move after it.
Dials it feeds
This factor is one input to a composite reading on the Analytics page.
Sectors it moves most
Trends tracked by this
Also in Consumer and housing
- Retail sales
- Consumer confidence and sentiment
- Personal income, spending, and saving rate
- Housing starts and permits
- Existing and new home sales
- Home prices
- Mortgage rates and applications
- Household net worth and the wealth effect
- Household savings buffers
- Homeowners insurance availability and cost
- The K-shaped consumer
- Homebuilder sentiment and pending home sales
- Market rent indices
- Auto sales (SAAR) and inventories
- Restaurant same-store sales and hotel RevPAR
- Card-spending panels
- Retail gasoline prices
- Residential electricity prices
- Childcare and tuition inflation
- Pet spending and vet prices