Americans are increasingly falling behind on their debt payments as inflation continues to erode real incomes, threatening to cause many consumers to declare bankruptcy.

Delinquency transitions, debts that were previously being paid but no longer are despite outstanding obligations, rose rapidly in the third quarter of 2023 in all forms of debt except for student loans, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Poor U.S. economic conditions linked to rising inflation and interest rates have left Americans unable to pay for previous obligations that they once could afford, according to experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Consumers pay for things three ways: income, savings and credit,” Michael Faulkender, chief economist and senior advisor for the Center for American Prosperity, told the DCNF. “We know that wages have not kept up with inflation over the last 2.5 years and that many households have spent all of the savings accumulated during the pandemic. Therefore, in order to maintain their spending levels, they have been adding to their credit card balances, such that aggregate balances have now eclipsed $1 trillion. Rising credit card debt in a rising interest rate environment with incomes not keeping pace will put more and more households into financial difficulty, resulting in delinquencies.”

Delinquency transitions for credit cards and auto loans saw the biggest increase among debt forms in the third quarter, rising to 8% and 7.4%, respectively, according to the New York Fed. Credit card debt increased to $1.08 trillion in the quarter, rising 4.7% from the second quarter, when it exceeded $1 trillion for the first time in U.S. history.

Real wages for average Americans have declined since President Joe Biden took office, sinking 2.1% from the first quarter of 2021 to the third quarter of 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Americans are increasingly turning to their savings to make up the difference in lost wages, with Americans collectively holding $687.7 billion in savings as of September 2023, compared to more than $1 trillion in May and nearly $6 trillion in April 2020.

“It likely indicates that average Americans are not doing well financially,” Jai Kedia, a research fellow for the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “The quarter-by-quarter increase in delinquencies is probably a signal that the economy is not as good as people thought earlier this year — rather that the hard landing many predicted last year but never came may simply have been delayed.”

An economic soft landing refers to a slowdown in market growth that avoids a recession, as opposed to a hard landing, which would result in a recession, slowing economic growth but also ultimately bringing inflation down. Following the September Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Jerome Powell, chair of the Fed, said a soft landing was not a baseline expectation for the Fed in its fight against inflation.

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