Rates of Missed Car and Credit Card Payments Surge Due to Inflation

The rate at which the average American fails to make credit card payments or car payments on time has skyrocketed under the Biden-Harris Administration, primarily due to the ongoing inflation crisis as well as a weakening labor market.

According to the Daily Caller, in the last year alone, at least 10% of all credit card balances became past due, while 8% of auto loan balances also passed their deadlines without being paid. This marks the highest rate of credit card delinquencies in the United States in over 10 years.

As a result, the stocks of major lending companies have fallen, with Ally Financial seeing its stock prices decrease by 18% last Tuesday; this came after Ally announced that the total number of charge-off payments, balances that the company was forced to write off due to borrowers being unlikely to pay them back, was much higher in July and August than originally expected.

Most companies expect the rate of unrepaid loans to continue to increase well throughout the rest of 2024. Bread Financial, a credit card-issuing company that specifically targets lower-income Americans, expects that such rates will remain high for the rest of the year; another company, Synchrony Financial, stated that it is facing higher delinquency rates than the pre-COVID era.

Inflation remains historically high, with prices overall having gone up by over 20% since Joe Biden took power in January of 2021. The rate of inflation peaked at 9% in June of 2022; by contrast, inflation was at a mere 1.4% at the end of President Donald Trump’s first term.

In addition, interest rate raises for credit cards have also gone up over the last three and a half years. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis stated that such rates reached 21.51% in May, up from about 15% in 2019.

Overall, the rate of delinquencies has reached nearly record highs under Biden and Harris. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said that delinquencies in the first quarter of 2024 were at the highest rates since they first began tracking this metric back in 2012.