Credit card debt rises to $1.26T, nearing all-time record

Ah, here it is https://bpi.com/missing-factors-in-the-cfpbs-analysis-of-ris...

This is basically equivalent from a credit risk perspective, the banks don’t really care what % is interest vs. principal.

It's almost like counting the "debt" between ringing up your items at wal-mart and paying. For those 30 seconds you owe money.

Based on some quick stats you could totally turn that into a useless headline "Americans accrued 4.1 billion dollars of debt every 30 seconds in 2025"

It has bailed me out of paying high interest rates and fees during hard times before.

Many years ago this "0% transfer" stuff was relatively new in the UK and a new outfit wanted to break into the market, they had two ideas which I guess they had costed as marketing ploys. First, the cards were a weird shape, this means there are a few applications where your card doesn't work, which is slightly annoying, but it's balanced by the brand recognition. Nobody cares which brand of rectangular plastic card you... oh, that's a weird shape.

But the Second was the easiest possible 0% transfer. To effect the transfer they write you a cheque for however much they'd agreed (let's say £1000) and you use that cheque to pay off a card or other line of credit. They charge 0% on this for 12 months.

What I, and lots of poor but money-savvy people did was sign up for the card. Deposit the cheque in an interet-bearing savings account, and set an alarm to pay the card off before that 0% expired.

So twelve months later you've made say £30 interest and you cut the card up. I don't know how many people did this, versus how many engaged with their product as they'd imagined. I know only two things:

1. I had about 50p outstanding balance to pay on my 12 month card, I figured they'd tell me I need to pay 50p within 30 days or whatever and if not they'd charge me extra - nope, they wrote saying "Your balance is negligible, we write off this tiny balance and don't expect to ever hear from you again".

2. This offer was never repeated. They did other 0% transfer offers but the "It's just a cheque" idea was never attempted again.

When bond prices drop, US interest rates go up, which hurts the real US economy.

And when bond prices drop, that devalues the remaining 90% of China's holdings, hurting China too.

The Fed could stabilize the bond market by printing dollars to buy the bonds itself, but that would devalue the dollar and drive up inflation in the US. When China tries to repatriate that wealth, they must sell dollars and buy yuan, which would drive up the value of the yuan, driving up the cost of Chinese exports, hurting their manufacturing sector.

It's mutually assured destruction.